During the Journées du Matrimoine 2025, AWARE invites kids, young people and those accompanying them — family, friends, teachers, educators — to discover the Villa Vassilieff through workshops and artistic creations conceived by six artists in dialogue with AWARE’s missions and its research centre.

This event is an opportunity for the association to share information about its work and the history of the Villa Vassilieff, and to honour six artists who have worked with it throughout the year. The guest artists — Cheryl Ann Bolden, Keywa Henri, Morgane Baffier and the Nest collective, made up of Park Chae Biole, Park Chae Dalle and Constance de Raucourt — have developed their work as part of AWARE’s residency, education and research programmes.

Saturday, September 20 and Sunday, September 21: open programming

Keywa Henri, Kalin’a Tɨlewuyu artist (indigenous nation of ‘French Guyana’) will present their animated short film Kassulu tolilɨ: Anaxi wonumingalɨ lo moloma [Story of beads: Anaxi’s choice], created as part of the research programme “The Origin of Others. Rewriting the history of art in the Americas, from the 19th century to the present day”. Freely inspired by the founding stories of the Kalin’a Tɨlewuyu nation, this fable invites us to follow the adventures of Anaxi, an emblematic figure of Kalin’a cosmovision, through the art of Native beading, an ancestral female practice. In a workshop for anyone aged 7 and over, Keywa Henri will share anecdotes and secrets from the making of the film, exploring the art of beadwork, from meaning to motif, from idea to finished object, and exploring the many facets of this practice.

The Nest collective, in residency at AWARE’s research centre in 2025, is proposing to explore a history of women that is both personal and subjective, through workshops on textile masks as well as culinary and imaginary recipes. Open to everyone aged 4 and over, these participatory workshops invite participants to pay tribute to the female figures who have marked their lives, to what they have passed on to them and to what they inspire in them. Following in the footsteps of the evolving installation work that the collective is developing as part of its residency at AWARE, it will intervene in the Villa space to accompany these workshops.

The artist-lecturer Morgane Baffier has been associated with AWARE’s educational programme at the Villa Vassilieff since 2023. To mark the Journées du Matrimoine (Heritage Days), she is presenting for the first time her lecture “Les M&M’s l’ont fait” [The M&M’s did it], conceived as part of this programme. Starting from the observation that women are under-represented in art, Morgane Baffier uses the codes of scholarly discourse and the lecture to reinterpret the past and question our certainties. By playing on misleading causalities, she encourages us to rethink the way in which historical narratives and gender stereotypes are constructed.

The AWARE team will be on hand throughout the weekend to tell you all about the association’s missions and the history of the Villa Vassilieff. This emblematic site in the Montparnasse district bears the name of the artist Marie Vassilieff, who moved there in 1912 and made it her studio, a place for training and parties, a canteen and a reception area for artists and thinkers from all over the world. This highly symbolic space has been redesigned by designer matali crasset for AWARE, and now houses its research centre entirely dedicated to women and non-binary artists.

Friday, September 19: workshops for groups of high-school students, on reservation

Nominated for the AWARE 2023 Prize and collaborating with the association’s educational programme since 2024, Cheryl Ann Bolden is offering the “Encounters with uncomfortable archives” workshop. This encounter provides an opportunity to reflect on archives, collective memory, heritage and racism using a selection of objects from the artist’s collection, including family mementos, finds, abandoned objects, historical artefacts and popular culture. Students are invited to meet, handle and interpret these objects, which will then be presented and contextualised by the artist.