Portrait of the 6 artists

An assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College in Chicago, photographer and video director David Schalliol is interested both academically and artistically in the relationship between community and place. His photographs and writing have appeared in such publications as Social Science Research and the New York Times, as well as in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural Belfast Photo Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Project.

Ishola Akpo is a multimedia artist and photographer from the Ivory Coast. In 2013, he was accepted into the Visas pour la Création program at the Institut français in Paris, where he created the project Pas de flash s’il vous plait! (No flash, please!). In 2015, as one of the artists selected for a Photoquai residency, he saw his work enter the collection at Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Akpo presented the series L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (The essential is invisible to the eye) at the 2016 Lagos Photo Festival in Nigeria. The Heinrich Böll Foundation award and the Freelens web documentary award, presented at the Toulouse MAP photography festival, are just some of the many prizes on his mantel.

Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Edu Monteiro began his photography career in 1991. Specializing in contemporary techniques, he seeks to develop interactions between photography and performance. Monteiro’s work has been exhibited in Brazil, China, and Russia.

Lourdes Segade is based in Barcelona. Her photographs have appeared in the New York Times, the Sunday Times Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune. She was nominated for Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund grant in 2013 and for the UNICEF Photo of the Year Award in 2014. That same year, she was selected by Acción Cultural Española and the Institut français for a two-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

Julie Stephen Chheng and Thomas Pons graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and completed a digital arts residency at Villa Kujoyama in 2016. Chheng develops connected apps and creates transmedia books, while Pons is a cartoonist who also produces animated films and video clips.

The French duo is behind the digital aspect of the France eMotion project. They created an animated character who is brought to life by a free and user-friendly augmented reality app. The animations can be viewed using the app at the exhibition, in print (postcards, catalogue, etc.), or on-screen in the comfort of your own home.