Charlie Aubry & Yasmine Tandjaoui

Yasmine Tandjaoui (b. 1984 in Algiers) is an architectural planner and photographer who studied at École Polytechnique d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme in Algiers, Institut Français d’Urbanisme and École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Belleville. She currently heads the cultural diffusion and programming department at CAUE92, which is the architecture, urban planning and environmental committee for the Hauts-de-Seine region. She approaches photography with an architect’s eye, homing in on urban forms, ordinary spaces and everyday micro-events.

Charlie Aubry (b. 1990 in Lillebonne) is a visual artist, musician and lecturer at École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. A graduate of Institut Supérieur des Arts et du Design de Toulouse (isdaT), his practice is a mix of reclamation, repurposing, DIY electronics, rough repairs, installation and sound performance. Since 2013 he has collaborated with Compagnie Maguy Marin. His work has been shown in France and internationally, including at Villa Médicis, Palais de Tokyo, Frac MECA, Frac Occitanie, Institut Français de Phnom Penh and Collection Lambert.

Yasmine Tandjaoui and Charlie Aubry ground their practice in the gestures and knowledge of the real world. Contre Productions, the mobile, critical and collaborative platform they founded in 2023, reconsiders forms of life, transmission and production alternatives.

A research and creation project, Contre Productions emerged from exchanges and discussions on emancipation by doing, educational freedom and situated gestures. The Villa Kujoyama residency is an opportunity to anchor this work in environments where forms of life invent other regimens of attention, time and knowledge. The project sets out to approach persistent, moving, slowly transforming forms. Japan appears as a place of friction between underground continuities and daily reformulations. Through architecture, music, photography, installation and publishing, the project will archive changing practices, in an entirely non-nostalgic way, to reveal their political implications. Three contexts will be explored: the workshop of a master artisan and the question of knowledge continuity; a domestic space that has become a place of intuitive fabrication, and an insular existence reimagined outside of expectations of productivity. Presented in all their singularity, these situations reveal subtle forms of resistance to a process of standardisation while offering different means for narration, transmission and experiencing the present.

©Rémy Dugoua