In Ernest’s office
Valérie Vangreveninge
To 11 December
Artist Residencies on Photography
La Villa Pérochon, a contemporary art center of national interest, is the former home of Ernest Pérochon, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1920.
In partnership with the Collège international de Photographie du Grand Paris, the Villa Pérochon inaugurates a new cycle of Artist Residencies on photography entitled Open Letters to Photography. It is aimed at established and emerging writers who wish to link their world to that of photography.
Based on the principle of correspondence, their open letters offer the opportunity for a literary experience that can enrich our view of the medium. The residency is performative in nature, inviting the writer to work in Ernest Pérochon’s office at the very heart of the art center.
Valérie Vangreveninge, emerging writer and first guest in this new format, is in residence from December 4 to 11, 2025.
” My idea is to write to a photo (or rather a photo of a photo) I received a few days ago: the photo of the main character in my novel.
Larbi, the hero of the story, a former harki from the Algerian war, has been with me almost every day for years. It’s about someone I knew but know almost nothing about (the idea of the book is to find out what his life was like), who is dead and whose face I haven’t seen for over 25 years.
What interests me is the emotional relationship with the image, a fixed, immobile object that nonetheless summons what is perhaps most alive in us: memories. But also the place of vernacular photography and the invisible links it creates, those moments of ‘pure reality’ and the confrontation between this raw reality and what memory does to us, how it plays on us, how memory is also fiction. ” Valérie Vangreveninge