Emilie Pierson & Cécile Rivet

A residency where forgotten archives are reinvented through collective creation, between personal memories and shared histories.

Émilie Pierson and Cécile Rivet are developing an artistic project centered on memory, transmission, and the reinvention of images from the past. Starting from a photo album found in Brussels, they explore what happens to our memories when they become detached from their owner. What do we do with our memories? What happens when our photographs or films no longer hold the value of a memory but only that of cumbersome old objects? Why do some people throw them away, while others collect anonymous faces that no longer belong to anyone? How can private, anonymous, or abandoned images become artistic material and part of a collective story?

During this residency, the artists aim to activate these questions in direct dialogue with two groups: participants from the association SINGA Luxembourg and students from the 2e Artistique class of Lycée Aline Mayrisch. Through practical workshops, each participant will be invited to handle these archives, question them, transform them, and project their own narratives—real or imagined—onto them.

This co-creation lies at the heart of the project: participants are not merely observers but become co-authors of a collective presentation. By confronting their experiences, sensibilities, and imaginations, they contribute to the emergence of a new artistic form where small histories meet the larger one, and where another’s memory becomes a common ground for storytelling, interpretation, and creation.

Émilie Pierson

Born to a Bulgarian mother and a French father, Émilie Pierson explores questions of identity, heritage, and Bulgarian memory. Through images, objects, sculptures, and narratives, she examines rituals, traditions, the communist past, and their traces in contemporary society. Her work navigates between the intimate and the collective, between France and Bulgaria.

Her recent research focuses on Bulgarian playgrounds from the communist era—symbols of a disappearing culture replaced by standardized modernization.

As a graduate of ESAL in 2018, she continues her practice in Metz. An emerging artist at Bliiida since 2023, she presented her film À la Mer Noire at FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in 2024, was nominated for the Edward Steichen Award, and exhibited in the CeCiL’s Box in 2025. Her work Milles pensées à toi recently joined the FRAC Lorraine collection.

Cécile Rivet

Cécile Rivet, an artist and writer born in 1992 in Metz and a graduate of ESAL, develops a body of work combining drawing, documentary, and animation. Her “vomited drawings” function like an open diary, where autofiction meets dark humor and an assumed fragility. She discovered documentary filmmaking by accident, approaching it with the same spontaneity and formal freedom.

Her work explores memory, secrets, taboos, and the imperfect transmissions that shape family histories. She is currently making Bonnes Femmes, a film about her fear of aging, and has been documenting for several years the creative process of Lucie—friend, artist, and living with OCD—as she develops her graphic novel.

It is always through the intimate that Cécile questions society, convinced that small, distorted, or fragile stories can also tell the larger one.

In collaboration with: Lycée Aline Mayrisch with teacher Stina Fisch, Singa Luxembourg and Nos Tribus.

Participants: Émilie Pierson and Cécile Rivet.