Biography

Camille Azaïs is a graduate of the École normale supérieure and holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Sociology. An art critic, she has been writing on environmental issues for more than ten years. She teaches art history at ésam Caen-Cherbourg.

She has contributed to numerous publications and journals, including Tools, for which she serves as editorial coordinator. She has also written several radio dramas for Radio France. In 2025, she published her first novel, Minimale, with Rotolux Press, extending her critical engagement with the ecological crisis through a literary form.

Research Project at Fondation Martell

At Fondation Martell, Camille Azaïs continued an ongoing writing project exploring the notion of rurality in contemporary art. Supported by a CNAP grant in 2022, this research has led her to investigate the various ways in which the concept of rurality is being redefined and expressed in recent artistic practices.

Through the study of the reappropriation of knowledge, skills, and forms of collective life rooted in peasant culture, the author examines the role of the object in recent redefinitions of artistic practice in response to ecological challenges.

Residency Outcomes

During her residency, Camille Azaïs initiated a series of encounters within Cognac and the surrounding area that enriched her ongoing writing on the central issue of artistic commons and their cultural significance in rural contexts.

The public presentation held in June 2025 provided an opportunity to share these reflections with the Foundation’s audience, offering insight into how a writer and researcher builds relationships within a territory in service of theoretical work. She discussed the influences, shifts in direction, and questions that emerged through this process and how they shaped her writing.

Connection to the Almanach Lab

Camille Azaïs’s work provides a theoretical counterpart to the experiments conducted by the resident designers and artists. Made available to artists and designer-researchers, her work helps deepen the questions raised by the creation of objects developed through environmentally conscious, site-specific, and collaborative approaches.

Resources Mobilised

• The Foundation’s embedded position within its local environment
• Documentation and archival resources
• Works and materials collected within the Almanach Laboratory (Labo Almanach)