Villa Medici x Louis Roederer Foundation Production Grants: 2025 winners
29/09/2025
Since 2024, the Louis Roederer Foundation has been selecting and supporting two co-production projects each year as part of the Villa Medici x Louis Roederer Foundation Production Grants: one artistic project and one research project.
Abdessamad El Montassir, Sadra Kodia, 2025 © Daniele Molajoli
Pierrre Von-Ow © Daniele Molajoli
This year, artist Abdessamad El Montassir and art historian and curator Pierre Von-Ow were selected among the residents of the 2024-2025 class by Audrey Bazin, artistic director of the Foundation.
In the visual arts, the Foundation was keen to support the deeply human exhibition project by artist Abdessamad El Montassir. Photographs and videos subtly and poetically bear witness to memory and forgetting, trauma and oppression. The story of people who resist the established order by defying the imposed silence.
In the field of research, the Foundation chose researcher Pierre von Ow’s exhibition project, which will allow visitors to see and touch light as it traverses the history of world art. The project encourages reflection on the representation of the invisible and the materiality of the elusive.
These two powerful and poetic projects, each exploring the sensitive dimensions of light and memory, bridge the gap between transmission and creation, which are at the heart of the Louis Roederer Foundation’s missions.
Abdessamad El Montassir © Daniele Molajoli
Abdessamad
El Montassir
Abdessamad El Montassir is a visual artist who, through his sound, film, and photographic installations, revisits the recent and ancestral history of this region.
A Stone Under the Tongue (Une pierre sous la langue), Abdessamad El Montassir’s monographic exhibition, co-produced by the Frac Franche-Comté and the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici as part of the Louis Roederer Foundation Grant, will be presented from October 17, 2025, to March 1, 2026. The exhibition refers to a Sahrawi poem that recommends placing a stone under the tongue to forget, and throwing it towards the sun to remember…
Pierre Von-Ow © Daniele Molajoli
Pierre Von-Ow
Born in 1992, Pierre Von-Ow is an art history researcher and exhibition curator whose research focuses on the intersections between arts and sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries.
His project takes as its starting point the lessons in optics taught by blind mathematician Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739). From the 18th century to the present day, the English mathematician’s lectures have fueled the imaginations of many philosophers and artists. Thanks to the Villa Medici x Louis Roederer Foundation Production Grant, Pierre Von-Ow is preparing an exhibition project demonstrating that, throughout history, humans have always wanted to touch light. More importantly, they have hoped to be touched by light.
