The exhibition of the scholarship holders of the French Academy in Rome this year takes the form of an enthusiastic exclamation that returns and extends the work of one year at Villa Medici. Presented from 18 June to 8 August 2021 by Laura Cherubini, the exhibition brings together the achievements of sixteen artists, creators and researchers at the end of a year of residency of creation, experimentation and research at Villa Medici.

Strongly multidisciplinary, ECCO highlights the articulation between individual creations and collective projects, and weaves unexpected links between the disciplines represented, from painting to sculpture passing through photography, architecture, sound creation, history and theory of art, musical composition, plastic arts and literature. The uniqueness of this 2021 edition lies in the fruitful encounter between sixteen personalities and as many artistic languages, which resulted in a collective editorial project that developed during the entire year of residence and which today constitutes one of the keys to access the exhibition. This choral project, conceived by the fellows in the autumn of 2020, took the form of an online monthly magazine that welcomes contributions of the most varied forms: videos, texts, sound tracks, photographs, drawings. Imagined in a free and experimental form, the magazine is developed in seven issues, each of which takes as its theme a term that evokes a sound and / or a form as a pretext for reflection.

The exhibition at the end of the year is part of this context of collaboration with which the fellows have given shape to a "provisional community", in the words of the curator Laura Cherubini. The spatial staging of each of the projects - some of which conceived in resonance with the magazine and others independently - will reveal other aspects of contemporary creation. 

The ECCO exhibition will be accompanied by an artist's book that brings together a selection of works by fellows from the French Academy in Rome. The book will be available for sale at Villa Medici.