Set in a nineteenth-century Provençal house on the banks of the Sorgue, the Villa Datris Foundation has been entirely devoted to contemporary sculpture since 2011. Founded by Danièle Kapel-Marcovici and Tristan Fourtine, it presents a new themed exhibition every year, free of charge, bringing together established and emerging artists, and has welcomed several hundred artists and several hundred thousand visitors since it opened.
For 2026, the Foundation pays tribute to the Mediterranean with Mediterranean, Contemporary Odysseys, bringing together around seventy artists from twenty countries. The exhibition considers the sea as a space of exchange, circulation, and passage, one now marked by climate migration, precarity, and the pain of exile. The route through the show also questions the mechanisms of exclusion and collective forgetting, while never losing sight of a deeply human and sensitive dimension.
The thematic journey invites visitors to follow the impulse of departure, then the wandering of those who, like the Ulysses figures of past and present, cross the Mediterranean in search of elsewhere. Other sections treat the sea as a cradle of struggle, since the cycles of conflict that have crossed it since the Iliad continue to shape its history. The visit extends into the Foundation's Mediterranean garden, where visitors are invited to leave a personal trace.
A second chapter of the exhibition unfolds in Paris at the Espace Monte-Cristo, with Diseuses de silence, giving voice to twenty-one French and international women sculptors drawn from the Foundation's collection.
