Bérénice Courtin

Born in Paris in 1994, Bérénice Courtin is a multidisciplinary artist. She is now based in Geneva, having completed a Master’s degree in Contemporary Applied Arts at the Massana school in Barcelona and an exchange at the HEAD school in Geneva.

She focuses on textile arts, audiovisual work, and performance. For the past two years, she has been working on research into the history of her grandfather Kazimierz Gaca, a Polish resistance fighter during the Second World War who worked with the Enigma machine. She has made fabrics with a Jacquard digital loom (TC2), in which she hid codes, inspired by encrypted messages, comparing the loom and the machine, both of which provided the basis of the computer and binary code. She also collaborated with artists to create an experimental film performance on this subject, which was presented at the La Alternativa festival at Barcelona’s CCCB.

In 2017, she collaborated with artisans in the regions of Oaxaca and Chiapas, mainly through the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. This enabled her to make modular traditional garments for the museum’s children’s area, using squares and rectangles sewn together to enable children to understand the different garments.