ARTIST RESIDENCY AT THE ARCHIVES: DELPHINE MELLIÈS
Artist residency at the Oralitat de Gasconha sound archive
Oralitat de Gasconha (Eth Ostau Comengés)
Gascony
France
June – December 2026
This is an initiative of Eth Ostau Comengés as part of the “Creative Europe Tramontana IV” project.
From June to December 2026, the visual artist and performer Delphine Melliès is in residence at Oralitat de Gasconha, the sound archive managed by Eth Ostau Comengés, as part of the Artist Residencies at Digital Archives call of the Tramontana Network.
Carried by the voices of the archive, her project explores the Occitan language, the memory of the Pyrenean mountains and the way speech lives in the body and in gesture. Through attentive listening, she gathers life stories, tales and narratives in the Occitan and Gascon dialects, accounts of daily life in the mountains, of landscapes shaped by farming and pastoral practices, of summer pastures and paths travelled by communities and their flocks, of evening gatherings and of the know-how passed down from generation to generation.
The approach is not a documentary restitution of the archive but a poetic and embodied rewriting, in which the archived voices resonate with the artist’s own memory of the Occitan language. The stories will be handwritten on metal plates, in a slow and repeated gesture: the resistance of the material slows the body down and turns writing into a form of listening, and each plate becomes a trace object carrying both the words and the marks of the hand that rewrote them.
In parallel, she will develop a series of performances of repeated readings, in which the stories are told, retold and shifted. The repetition of voice and gesture deliberately creates a gap with the original accounts, bringing out the variations, omissions and slippages that belong to all oral transmission, and revealing a language in motion rather than a fixed text.
Born in 1993, Delphine Melliès lives and works between Paris, Pantin, the Haute-Corrèze and the Pyrenees. A visual artist and performer, she develops a practice built around a poetics of memory, attentive to rural and pastoral memories and to the ordinary gestures and know-how of everyday life. Her research is deeply rooted in the territory of her childhood, the Ariège and the Pyrenees. She studied photography at the École de Condé and graduated in Art History from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2018, and she is a member of the Turbo! (Pantin) and Embrayage (Paris) collectives.
In 2022 she presented the performance “Transhumance” at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, during the Fête de l’Ours, and her work has since been shown at Les Sheds contemporary art centre in Pantin, Les Arches Citoyennes and Galerie Houg in Paris. She has been in residence at La Maison (Salon-la-Tour), Les Sheds and Les Arches Citoyennes, and her embroidered photographs appear in Michel Poivert’s book “Contre-culture dans la photographie contemporaine” (Textuel, 2022).