PARIS.- Taking Cité internationale des arts as the starting point, To Make Space for the World proposes a wider reflection on how contemporary artists address the promises, contradictions and afterlives of cultural internationalism, a form of exchange, action, and solidarity that extends beyond national frameworks.

Bringing together 16 artists from 15 different countries (in residence between 2003 and the present day), To Make Space for the World presents the relation to borders, known as the international, not as a settled value, but as something lived unevenly: a daily process of negotiation, translation, hospitality and forced displacement for many; a structure of opportunity, but also of dependence; a promise that could orient artists powerfully, while never entirely escaping the political and cultural asymmetries of the world around it.

While the Cité internationale des arts was conceived during the interwar period and established after the Second World War, shaped by a Europe scarred with war and genocide, the founders proposed another horizon: one in which artistic exchange might produce forms of proximity and relation that nation states had failed to sustain in the decades before. In its name, Cité internationale des arts, the emphasis falls on the place itself as an international exception with its own codes, rhythms and temporary communities. Cité was imagined as a city within a city, a place that might suspend, if only partially, the hierarchies of the world of nation states beyond its walls.

Yet Cité was also inseparable from a wider French cultural ambition. It has therefore always held two contrasting impulses: a commitment to be open to the world and a mission to put Paris at its centre. This tension inspired the exhibition title and many of the participating artists, raising questions of power relations and access to mobility.

Some artists propose horizontal forms of gathering: carnival and caravan as metaphors of exchange and safe harbor, song as the promise of return amidst annihilation, or matrilineality as an alternative social structure. Other projects remind us of art as a temporary refuge from grief and trauma, a suturing of wounds physical and symbolic, or a herald of hidden histories coming home to roost.





Curated by:

Chương-Đài Võ, Charles Esche & Federica Chiocchetti

Chương-Đài Võ

Chương-Đài Võ is a guest curator at the Ygrec Art Centre – ENSAPC and a lecturer at ENSAPC. Among her recent projects, she served as artistic director of the Africa-Asia Festival in Dakar in 2025, and co-edited, with Charles Esche, the book The Museum is Multiple: Van Abbemuseum 2004–24. Her essays have been published by Afterall, the Albertinum Museum, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, the Moderna galerija and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. She was in residence at the Cité internationale des arts in 2022–2023 as part of the 2-12 programme.

Charles Esche

Charles Esche is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. He is a member of the L’Internationale association and is developing the Three Ashes Foundation on a site near Bucharest, Romania. He is a lecturer in contemporary art and curatorial practice at the University of the Arts London, an adviser to the Jan van Eyck Academie and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. He was director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2004–2024) and the Rooseum in Malmö (2000–2004).

Federica Chiocchetti, Arts and Culture Programme Manager

Federica Chiocchetti is the curator in charge of the artistic and cultural programming at the Cité internationale des arts, where she was in residency in 2019. Between 2022 and 2026, she directed the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (MBAL) in Switzerland. A nominator for the Bob Calle Artist’s Book Prize, she also served on the jury for the Swiss Pavilion of Pro Helvetia at the Venice Biennale Arte 2026. She holds a PhD on the intersections between text and image from the University of Westminster and is the author of short stories and prose poems under the pseudonyme Candida Desideri.