Collective residencies / Creation and context: live arts within a landscape / Olot
JUSTINE BERTHILLOT
From Monday, 9 March 2026 to Sunday, 15 March 2026
Bio
Justine Berthillot is a circus artist, choreographer, and director.
After studying philosophy, she trained at the CNAC (National Center for Circus Arts) and created her first piece, Noos, in 2015 at the National Dance Center, which toured for many years in France and internationally. She is the artistic director of the Morgane company, with which she creates acrobatic, choreographic, and performative works. She is particularly interested in the articulation and encounter of the body with other artistic languages in order to create hybrid narratives. With writer Pauline Peyrade, she has created three pieces combining muscle and words: Poings, Carrosse, and L'Âge de détruire. In 2021, she created two solo performances in situ: Notre Forêt, created at the Centre Pompidou-Metz for the Passages Festival; and in 2022, DESORDEN, created at the Espace des Arts in Chalon-sur-Saône at the Transdanses Festival. In 2023, she created a large-scale circus performance, On ne fait pas de pacte avec les bêtes, with Mosi Espinoza at the Cirque-Théâtre d'Elbeuf. She is an associate artist at the Espace des Arts, Scène Nationale Chalon-sur-Saône, from 2020 to 2024, and a creative artist for the 2023/2024 season at the Centre National de la Danse, Lyon.
Project
Justine Berthillot will continue her research into eco-feminist thinking and the links between female emancipation, connection to living beings and spirituality, and the concept of zoofuturism. In a world plagued by climate change, she intends to continue inventing regenerative post-modern mythologies and performative, hybrid narratives.
To this end, she will work with students at the Olot School of Art on the concept of “ancestral geologies” and their performance.
My residency at Faberlull was a regenerating and inspiring bubble, a vital breath of fresh air for artists. First of all, the feeling of getting away from the world, with this immersion in Olot and its landscapes that feed the imagination, proved very valuable. I needed it to create, to make space and accommodate new thoughts and artistic dreams.
The free personal pace and proximity to other artists and researchers was also hugely inspiring: being able to exchange our experiences, our artistic and human processes... Forming a community is something deeply encouraging and promising to re-immerse ourselves in our underground and intimate investigations as well.
In a time of crisis for the performing arts industry, Faberllull has restored my faith; knowing there are research spaces in the arts and humanities and that researchers and artists can imagine engaging stories of desirable futures was of great help. I could immerse myself completely freely in the "becoming a mermaid" that animates my next creation, document myself again, write, let all the images of my creative beginnings settle, question my choices... The mermaids were with me a lot during this stay (with this pool also right under my window!). I worked on developing them with other species... This made my stay in Olot somewhat fantastic and unreal!
I loved meeting the students of the Olot School of Art and their teachers, who brought me back to reality and with whom, in the same vein, I was keen to work to conjure up ancestral geologies and works in order to better "repair the world". Imbued with my research, I believe this influenced and nuanced my intervention with them to a degree, since I tried first and foremost to offer them a space where they could take the time to feel, to let themselves be carried away... before any artistic act.
Thank you for valuing, materialising and understanding our needs, our times and our work processes with this ideal framework that allowed sensations and ideas — and soon works — to emerge, which I hope will go some way to repairing the world and our imaginaries a little!