Lisa Tronca

How can research create space and be curated? This question guided Lisa Tronca – curator, author, and co-executive director of the magazine ESPACE art actuel – throughout her residency at Est-Nord-Est. The walls of her studio were carpeted with notes, images, quotations, and concepts, connected by red strings to an installation of tables on which books, images, rocks, and plants were arranged. This was a true foray into the prolific exploratory process that underlies all writing. By adopting a methodology rooted in the absorption and accumulation of elements, Tronca envisaged her time at Est-Nord-Est as an ideal opportunity to slow down and immerse herself completely in reading, while attuning herself to the environment and to her own senses. One of the central themes of Tronca’s explorations is the feeling of general crisis that paralyzes otherwise unfettered creativity. Reading between the lines of the essayist Dalie Giroux’s book Une civilisation de feu (2023), Tronca wonders how creation can be accomplished in a world in which we feel immobilized by escalating crises and struggles. Another of her thematic anchorages is the liminal space of the shoreline, here envisaged as a point of encounter between terra firma and the aqueous fluidity of the river. After reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Theory of Water (2025) and as a logical extension of her most recent curatorial project, De terre et d’onde/This shore is a body is a world is a house, presented at the Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Tronca leaned into the memories and agency of matter and the ways that contemporary art activates and mediates them. A look back at her curatorial practice also led her to re-examine her recent residency, organized by Molior, in central Europe, where she researched the growing political repression in cultural institutions and the stance of engaged curatorship. Tronca easily found and interacted with her thoughts around the notions of crisis, liminal spaces, and engaged curatorship. Inspired by Michael Nardone’s book Convivialities: Dialogues on Poetics (2025), in which dialogue emerges from the mingling of creative, poetic, and political processes, she staged her research as a fruitful encounter that will certainly nourish her multidisciplinary practice.