Virginie Letac Fardel has been a graduate of the Professional Master in Contemporary Art Market since 2015.
After her contemporary art program at IESA arts&culture, she founded and runs her company Artagema, which supports entrepreneurship in creative and cultural organizations.
For the Ciné-Corps festival, of which IESA is a partner, she is in charge of private partnerships.
What happened after IESA arts&culture? Can you tell us about your career path?
Having just graduated from the Professional Master Contemporary Art Market at the end of 2015, a happy coincidence led me to cross paths with Romain Sabah - a former IESA arts&culture student - at the Palais de Tokyo exhibition "Artistes à la Une pour la Liberté," which he co-curated with Nicolas Couturieux. Heading Nineteen Sixteen, an agency specializing in urban art and street art, he was looking for an experienced profile to structure and roll out his business with wealthy individuals and companies. For nearly a year, working alongside Romain and his team, I worked on business development, on the design and execution of artistic event projects, and on public relations and communication for artists such as Tania Mouraud, Thomas Canto, Tilt, C215, and others from the agency. A market experience combined with a dive into urban artistic practices, complementing those carried out during the Master Contemporary Art at Véronique Smagghe’s, a great specialist of the Affichistes movement, which touches me particularly.
In early 2017, I launched my business through the company ARTAGEMA with the idea of supporting entrepreneurship in creative and cultural organizations as well as the structuring and development of artistic creations enhanced by cutting-edge technologies. The association Ecole D’art Au Village contacted me for a digital socio-artistic project linked to the Château de Versailles and the New York Public Library. Other projects in film, multimedia, and digital art followed.
How did you get involved with the Ciné-Corps Festival?
As so often in the world of culture, it is the play of encounters and affinities that carries you. Isabelle Logeais, my former sponsorship professor at IESA, recommended me to the video-dance filmmaker Virginie Combet, founder of the Ciné-Corps Festival six years ago in Strasbourg, who was looking for someone to build private partnerships to support the festival’s first Paris edition, which will take place from January 31 to February 4 at the Cinéma Majestic Passy, affiliated with the Écrans de Paris network. The collaboration was sealed.
What Does the Partnership Between the Festival and IESA arts&culture Involve?
It is a financial, skills-based, and educational partnership, with the school providing the Ciné-Corps Festival with three student interns from the film track.
This partnership confirms IESA’s commitment to the field of digital creation and the arts following the school’s launch in 2017 of its cultural start-up incubator. Indeed, IESA will sit on the Festival’s hackathon jury and will on this occasion award an IESA Prize in the form of support for developing the project.
Can you tell us how the hackathon will work?
The Ciné-Corps 2018 hackathon is a first in France. This unique event blends experimentation and co-creation to bring together dance, audiovisual media, and immersive creation.
Teams of three participants, supervised by professionals, will be invited, starting from an initial theme, to propose a virtual reality project placing the body at the heart of the immersion. The jury, made up of dance, film, and digital creation professionals invited by the festival, will meet to choose the most successful project. It will be presented to the public at the Ciné-Corps festival’s special screening on Sunday, February 4 at 20:00 at the Cinéma Majestic Passy. It will also receive a 15-day residency at commune Image, a virtual reality project incubator. One of the projects will receive the IESA Prize, which is support for developing the chosen project. Xavier de la Vega, interactive designer/producer at Picseyes films and new media journalist, will coordinate the hackathon on February 3 and 4.