Jean-Baptiste Decavèle
Born in Grenoble, 1961 and lives in Paris
Jean-Baptiste Decavèle has won the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs prize twice: in 1999 for his project Entre Ciel et Mer, Voyage Aide-Mémoires, in collaboration with french writer Hervé Le Tellier from Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle); and in 2001 for Nostalgie, La Demeurance et l’Icône, in collaboration with South-African poet Tatamkhulu Afrika. His work is based on collaborative experimental process, going from writers to actress and actors such as Elina Löwensohn, Michael Lonsdale, as well as to artists like Nico Dockx. Decavèle has been associated with the architect Yona Friedman for ten years. Their association generates a constellation of projects such as architectural in situ adaptations of some of Yona Friedman’s ideas; implementation of a corpus of photographic and filmic realisations related to Yona Friedman’s visionary universe… In addition to these projects, they both share a deep friendship that started with Balkis-Island, an imaginary island named after Yona Friedman’s late dog Balkis; an island that Decavèle brought back from one of his numerous journeys, looking for Balkis from High Arctic to the North Pole. His work have been presented in Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, Russia, USA, Mexico, Switzerland, The Nederlands, South-Afrika, Canada, Korea.
