Photography, Cinema, and the Deconstruction of the Imaginary at Villa Medici
From February 25, 2026, the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici opens to the public two exhibition projects that do not merely present works, but question the very nature of the image: How does a gaze come into being? How does a myth take shape and sediment over time? When does a photograph become memory, and when does it instead become an instrument of power?
The exhibitions Agnès Varda. Here and There, Between Paris and Rome (February 25 – May 25, 2026) and Nicole Gravier. Fotoromanzo (February 25 – May 4, 2026) unfold along distinct yet converging trajectories: on the one hand, the image as an act of attention to reality; on the other, the image as an ideological structure to be dismantled. In both cases, the feminine is not an identity category, but a critical position — a posture of thought.
Agnès Varda. Here and There, Between Paris and Rome
February 25 – May 25, 2026
“In my films I have always wanted to make people see deeply. I do not want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.”
With this first major Italian retrospective devoted to the photographic work of Agnès Varda, Villa Medici brings to light the silent matrix of a cinema that always thought in images before it thought in narratives. For Varda, photography does not precede film: it contains it in latent form. It is notebook, threshold, and exercise in proximity. Cinema becomes its expanded echo.
The symbolic heart of the exhibition is Paris — and more specifically the courtyard-studio on rue Daguerre: not merely an address, but an ontological space. There the artist lived, worked, and held her first exhibition in 1954. That courtyard is at once interior and exterior, home and stage, intimacy and openness. The city enters it as living matter: working-class neighborhoods, peripheral faces, subtle ironies, details that escape monumentality.
Varda’s Paris is not a capital but a fabric; not an icon but a weave. It is observed “from below,” as though the gaze were always seeking a point of lesser visibility in order to restore dignity to what History leaves at the margins.
Alongside Paris stands Italy — not as postcard, but as counter-shot. In her travels between Venice and Rome, in Renaissance villas and gardens, on film sets, Varda exercises a curiosity that is already a form of thought. In 1963 she photographs Luchino Visconti shortly after his award for The Leopard, meets Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Contempt, and portrays Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Michel Piccoli. Yet here too, behind the event, remains her attention to the smallest gesture, the interval, the shadow that structures the composition.
The exhibition brings together 130 original prints, film excerpts, documents, posters, production stills, and personal objects. The project originates from the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris (presented in Paris from April 9 to August 24, 2025), in collaboration with Paris Musées and Rosalie Varda. The Italian section is curated in co-production with the Institut pour la photographie des Hauts-de-France, based on the photographic holdings and archives of the Succession Agnès Varda. The project is grounded in over two years of research in the archives and the Ciné-Tamaris collection.
The exhibition unfolds in nine chapters: from Varda’s early Parisian years to the transformation of the courtyard into a “garden-court,” culminating in a city that becomes an emotional and political mirror. Women and marginal figures emerge not as themes, but as necessities of the gaze: what is invisible demands form.
In dialogue with Varda, works by Giancarlo Botti, Michaële Buisson, Alexander Calder, Martine Franck, Dominique Genty, JR, Liliane de Kermadec, Michèle Laurent, Claude Nori, Laurent Sully-Jaulmes, Robert Picard, Valentine Schlegel, and Collier Schorr expand the relational constellation within which her work was generated and continually reinvented.
The tribute extends in Italy with Viva Varda! Cinema Is a Woman at the Cineteca di Bologna, at the Galleria Modernissimo (March 5, 2026 – January 10, 2027), in collaboration with La Cinémathèque française. The program includes a complete retrospective at Cinema Modernissimo and the Italian publication of Agnès Varda by Laure Adler (Gallimard).
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Le Paris d’Agnès Varda – de-ci, de-là, edited by Anne de Mondenard and published by Paris Musées (240 pages, 250 illustrations; graphic design by Jad Hussein; €39; 24 x 32 cm), with texts by Antoine de Baecque, Anne de Mondenard, Dominique Païni, Carole Sandrin, and Rosalie Varda.
Nicole Gravier. Fotoromanzo
February 25 – May 4, 2026
“The images of women’s magazines and photo-romance publications are not innocent: they transmit behavioral models and construct social roles.”
In parallel, Villa Medici presents the first institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to Nicole Gravier, born in Arles in 1949 and active in Italy since the 1970s.
If Varda listens to the city, Gravier dismantles the language that represents it. Her field of action is the photo-romance and advertising: territories in which desire is prefabricated and happiness assumes the compulsory form of heterosexual love, marriage, and conformist success.
In the series Miti & Cliché: Fotoromanzi, the artist appropriates the codes of 1970s Italian photo-romances, theatricalizes them, and fractures them. Reiterated poses, tilted gazes, gestures of submission: everything is exposed as construction. The image is no longer promise but device.
With Miti & Cliché: Pubblicità, the critique extends to fashion and women’s magazines: normative models of beauty and fulfillment are cut, recomposed, disturbed. The gesture is both semiotic and political. One perceives in filigree the lesson of Roland Barthes and the resonance with Italian feminist thought of the 1970s, in ideal dialogue with Carla Lonzi, Mirella Bentivoglio, and Tomaso Binga.
Gravier demonstrates that signs are not innocent: they produce subjectivities. Yet what is constructed can be overturned. The image thus becomes a symbolic battlefield, a space in which woman is no longer the object of narration but the subject of enunciation.
French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici
Founded in 1666 by Louis XIV and housed since 1803 in the 16th-century villa on the Pincian Hill, surrounded by a seven-hectare park, the Academy is today a public institution under the French Ministry of Culture.
Its three intertwined missions are:
- to host artists, creators, and researchers in residence;
- to present a cultural program open to all artistic languages;
- to preserve, restore, and promote its architectural and landscape heritage.
Director: Sam Stourdzé.
Information
French Academy in Rome — Villa Medici
Viale della Trinità dei Monti, 1 – Rome
Infoline: +39 06 67611
Official website: villamedici.it
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