la Becque
ECAL & EXECAL Residence

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Charles Engman is an artist, photographer, educator, and creative director for the sustainable fashion brand Collina Strada. His multidisciplinary practice examines the social and emotional dimensions of imagery and hyper-visibility in contemporary culture, with a focus on the body as a site of mediation between the self and otherness. Engman’s recent work integrates generative AI, positioning him at the forefront of exploring how technology shapes and transforms the visual and emotional dynamics of contemporary life.

His use of AI questions how disembodied technologies mediate representations of the body, visual identity, and cultural production, offering a critical insight into the evolving relationships between labor, capital, and creativity. Engman is the author of three books: MOM (2020), a long-term collaborative project with his mother that explores representation and intimacy; Hello Chaos: A Love Story – The Disorder of Seeing and Being Seen (2024), a genre-defying critical theory book examining contemporary visual culture; and Cursed (2024), an artist monograph entirely created with generative AI. Alongside his creative projects, Engman works as a commercial image maker, primarily in the fashion industry, using this practice to research, explore, and engage with the role of advertising in shaping social space and contemporary notions of the self. For his residency at La Becque, he will deepen these themes by developing a new body of work that reflects his ongoing research into image-making, the body, and the economies of visibility.

Born in Finland in 1991, is a writer and art critic based in Paris. Her writings have appeared in numerous prestigious publications such as Art Forum, Los Angeles Review of Books, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, and C Magazine. Her essays on theoretical criticism, literature and visual culture have also appeared in the catalogs and books of Inventory Press, American Art Catalogues, and Semiotext(e). Tarasoff's area of research focuses on the cultural milieu of Los Angeles in the 1980s, and was presented at the Hammer Museum Biennial in 2020, a version; a book entitled “Fantasyworld” containing his writings is currently in development. Tarasoff is also the editor of poet Bob Flanagan's first anthology “Fun To Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan”, published by Kristina Kite Gallery and Pep Talk.

Based in London, Philippe Malouin is a British-Canadian product designer and interior architect born in 1982. A graduate of the Design Academy in Eindhoven, he also studied at the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle in Paris and at the Université de Montréal. In his practice, Malouin celebrates geometric shapes, natural materials, imperfections and contrasts, creating avant-garde objects that have won him numerous awards, including Designer of the Future from W Hotels and Best Use of Material from Wallpaper. He is particularly renowned for creating art objects, installations and furniture such as tables, rugs, chairs and lights.

Born in 1978, Alejo Moguillansky is an Argentinian director, producer, screenwriter and editor whose films have been shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlinale, the Locarno Film Festival and the Viennale, among others, and have been the subject of numerous retrospectives. Co-founder of the production company El Pampero Cine and programmer for the VECINE festival, Moguillansky also teaches cinema at the Universidad del Cine and the Universidad Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where he is also a member of the Revista de Cine. Alejo Moguillansky’s teaching semester at the Cinema Department of the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) will include a workshop on the process of directorial research, as a generator of new possible forms for cinematographic creation.

As a partners at Perron–Roettinger, designer Brian Roettinger has worked on creative projects with some of the world’s biggest brands and musicians. Roettinger’s work is an uncanny union of punk ideology with a conceptually driven mode of modernist design. He frequently employs architectural strategies such as repetition and structure, while subverting this sense of order by manipulating the production process in unexpected or “wrong” ways (think pulling the sheet out of the printer before it is done). He continues to work with a wide variety of artists and brands taking an holistic approach to the design process from idea to completion. His work is diverse spanning album packaging, publications, branding, campaigns, and product design. He has been nominated for numerous awards included three Art Direction Grammy’s for album packaging.

Yehwan Song, born in 1995, is a Korean-born artist, graphic designer, and web developer. She designs and develops experimental websites and interactive graphics driven by content structure instead of static templates and web design conventions. Through her projects, she tries to flip the general understanding of web design and subvert common user-experience behaviors, which oversimplify users' behavior. She pursues diversity above consistency and efficiency. Her ongoing project, Anti User-friendly, challenges the concept of user- friendliness by creating a situation in which users need to learn, explore, understand and become conscious before they can use it, instead of repeating the same behavior they've been trained to do, as a form of self- care.

Irene Vlachou, born in 1981, is based in Athens, Greece. She gained her Masters in type design at the University of Reading in 2004. She subsequently started to collaborate with international type foundries and corporations, working as a type designer and as a Greek type consultant. In 2012, she released Colvert Greek with typographies.fr. From 2013 to 2019, she was a senior designer and variable font expert at Type-Together. She has been participating since 2017 in the Google Summer of Code on behalf of the Greek Open Source Community (GFOSS), as a mentor on the expansion of Greek libre fonts. She is currently working full time freelancing Greek and variable font for retail and OEM/System fonts. In 2017, in collaboration with Laurenz Brunner, she designed the Greek counterpart of the Documenta14 exhibition’s identity font, Bradford Greek. She launched FauxFoundry (2019), together with Laurence Penney, a webfont service using variable font technology that provides automatic fallback fonts when the main font lacks characters. She is a guest lecturer for the MA in Type Design and the BA in Graphic Design at ECAL.

Natsuko Uchino was born in 1983 in Kumamoto, Japan. She lives and works in the south of France. She graduated from The Cooper Union, New York in 2007 and the research program of the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan in 2012. Natsuko Uchino is an artist whose practice is defined by experiments in agriculture and crafts. She combines these disciplines by re-evaluating production techniques through collaboration, conviviality and exchange. Natsuko Uchino develops a transversal practice ranging from art to ecology. Her installations and performances combine the multiple materials of sculpture, image, functional object and the living. She has taught in the framework of the Master in Visual Arts at ECAL with Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.

Born in 1984 in New York (United States), Matthew Lutz-Kinoy lives and works in Los Angeles (United States) and Paris (France). Working across various mediums including sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and painting, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s allegiance is not fixed to a single medium but depends on their shared developments in form and a simultaneity in practice. He was a guest lecturer for the MA in Fine Arts at ECAL with Natsuko Uchino.

Wataru Kumano is a Japanese product designer. After studying at Aalto University (FI), Kumano worked for Jasper Morrison’s Tokyo-based studio. He has now founded his own design office « kumano ». In 2021, he was nominated Associate Professor at Musashino Art University. His simple and functional designs are inspired by Finnish woodworking techniques as well as traditional Japanese craftsmanship. Kumano will be a guest lecturer in the Bachelor Industrial Design and Master Product Design throughout the spring semester 2021. For his residency project, he will examine the Swiss and Japanese artisanal woodwork techniques to conceptualise new shapes, at the intersection of nature, tradition and daily convenience.

Danielle Lessovitz, screenwriter and film director based in Brooklyn (New York), has been invited to teach in the Cinema department of ECAL for the fall semester 2020-2021. She will simultaneously work on her future film projects. Her practice varies between filmmaking and artistic or video installations. Her projects typically focus on marginalized communities and she often stars non-professional actors.

Mario de Vega, sound artist from Mexico City currently based in Berlin, was the second ECAL Resident at La Becque, from October 2019 to February 2020. Sonority, presence and invisibility are the starting points of his artistic work and research. He taught in the BA and MA Fine Arts as well as in the BA Media & Interaction Design.

Mitch Paone, partner and creative director at renowned Brooklyn-based creative design agency DIA Studio. Specialized in kinetic identity systems, graphic design and typography, Mitch Paone spent four months at La Becque developing his own research project while guest lecturing during the entire spring semester at ECAL, in the Bachelor Graphic Design and Master Type Design programmes.

Simone C. Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam, joined us from February to July 2020, in collaboration with François Zajéga, a software artist living in Brussels. Simone C. Niquille's practice, Technoflesh, investigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance. She taught in the MA Photography and BA Media & Interaction Design, as well as participate in the research project Automated Photography. François Zajéga started his carrier as a designer and web-developer in the early 2000. He later joined the numediart institute, a research lab from to the University of Mons (BE), as a specialist in image processing and human/machine interaction. In the same time, he started to exhibits his work across Europe in festival and galleries. Highly involved in libre software and libre culture, he’s teaching programming for art and videogames in several schools.

François Zajéga started his carrier as a designer and web-developer in the early 2000. He later joined the numediart institute, a research lab from to the University of Mons (BE), as a specialist in image processing and human/machine interaction. In the same time, he started to exhibits his work across Europe in festival and galleries. Highly involved in libre software and libre culture, he’s teaching programming for art and videogames in several schools.

Loucia Carlier is a French artist and editor, born in 1992 in Paris. She graduated with a Master’s in Visual Arts – European Art Ensemble from the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne in 2017. She was awarded the Révélation Émerige grant in 2020, was a resident at Villa Belleville in 2023, and is currently in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Images, symbols, objects, and texts are assembled through embossing, printing, and modeling on the surface of her works, blending sculpture and painting. These compositions form hybrid landscapes of a post-humanity undergoing reorganization. A network of archetypal images and organic elements swell and work from within each of her pieces, where the possibility of a subjective, relative, and resilient cosmology opens up through ruptures. The interdependence of the body and environment is not necessarily the most uplifting in the era of capitalism, patriarchy, and ecological crisis; her work tells the underlying anxieties of a generation born in the 90s. Caves, parts of bodies, architectures mixed with medical, ufological, or psychedelic imagery are printed and sculpted onto the surface of her pieces. Sometimes enhanced with makeup, her works act as a second skin: reactive to external aggressions and internal inflammations that one struggles to hide.

Her work is regularly featured in solo and group exhibitions (Le Nouveau Printemps in Toulouse, CAC Brétigny, Salon de Montrouge, Villa Belleville, Swiss Art Awards, Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille, Forde, Contemporary Art Center of Geneva, Villa Noailles, Villa Emerige, High Art, Ferme de la Chapelle, Wallriss, Hamlet Zurich, Art:Concept, Artgenève, Museum of Fine Arts of Lausanne…). In parallel to her artistic practice, she has co-directed the independent magazine Klima since 2018. Dedicated to the intersection of contemporary artistic creation, academic research, social sciences, politics, and activist knowledge, the magazine also develops through launches, study days, literary salons, exhibitions, and fairs (Voiture 14, Artorama Fair in Marseille, Octobre Numérique in Arles, Paris Internationale Fair, Salon de Normandy in Paris, Liste in Basel, Art Geneva Fair, Offprint Paris/London, The Salon Nada & The Community in Paris, Forde Geneva…).

Born in 1993, Thaddé Comar is a French-Swiss photographer who graduated from ECAL in 2018. His work explores contemporary social and political dynamics, with a particular focus on protest movements. He has dedicated several years to documenting the Black Bloc movement in Paris. In 2022, he published How Was Your Dream? (Mörel Books), a book on the protests in Hong Kong between June and October 2019, addressing new forms of insurrection in surveillance societies. His photographs have been regularly exhibited, including at the Rencontres d'Arles, the Photographic Center of Geneva, Art Basel, and the 7L Bookstore. He currently lives in Paris.