IDAa four-year-old Parisian consulting agency specializing in the development of art acquisitions, exhibitions, commissions and custom events, mainly connecting corporate enterprises with artists. But the founders Florence Marmiessea French art consultant who came out Sotheby’s AND ArtcurialAND Camilla D’Alfonsoan Italian photographer, also started a short-term summer residency in Italy as a special way to promote artists’ projects.
Since the founding of the agency, they have teamed up with players in the world of hospitality – hotels, restaurants, real estate – to define, as Marmiesse says, “how art can be injected into different aspects of companies”. It is imperative, on the one hand, to understand the needs of the company: “we make sure it’s done on budget, it’s done on time, deadlines are met”, but also, “we do a lot of pedagogy” – which means educating organizations about artistic value and pushing their thinking to be more flexible.
(Both are regularly contacted by hotels who say, we have a wall, can you fill it? “We’re like: That’s not really how it works to create an exhibition,” says Marmiesse. D’Alfonso asserts: “We’re not decorators.”)
On the other hand, adds Marmiesse, the needs of the artist are just as important. “You have to pay the artist; they have to grow… we, as intermediaries, are making sure that artists feel well understood and respected, that they have freedom and are able to do their art properly. We make sure that artists are not used as a marketing tool: we want to value their work.”
Throughout the year, they accompany their clients on art acquisition missions, patronage support and commissions. They have collaborated with the modeling agency Eileen Ford and Hoxton Hotels. Part of their time is spent scouting artists at art fairs, attending graduation shows at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and other similar schools, and making studio visits.
The agency’s name refers to the highest mountain on Greece’s most populous island, Crete, where Marmiesse and D’Alfonso once traveled and where, according to legend, the Greek god Zeus was born. Although based in Paris, the two travel frequently: “it’s very important for us to be able to get out of the Parisian microcosm.”
Thinking beyond the microcosm of Paris prompted the creation of the artist residence in Ebbio, a restored 13th-century farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside near Siena and an hour’s drive from Florence (also not far from Castello di Ama, a winery that also hosts artists). Set amidst a particularly fertile landscape under which a volcanic geology rolls, the program is open to artists worldwide, regardless of medium. It is very short, taking place every two years, two weeks each for four artists in two summer sessions, but comes with curatorial, administrative and logistical support.
The partnership with Ebbio is mandatory for the availability of the property, as it is otherwise a yoga and functional hotel. The residency is anchored around a perennial theme, “Seeds Grow,” supporting artistic experimentation and development. The theme helps refine the selection process, which respectfully matches the naturalism of the seven hectares, given its bounty of olive trees, lavender fields, a summer garden filled with herbs and vegetables, and an array of chickens and geese. The emphasis on nature “is not a green cleaning, but really because we want to give value to it,” says Marmiesse.
For the second year of the residency, the selection was guided by a jury of art world figures including Sotheby’s Phyllis Kao Auctionjournalist George Nelsongallerist Romero Paprocki– whose Parisian space will host the results of the residency in Paris in July 2027 – and the two founders of IDA. They seek diversity in terms of background, nationality and career, with each jury nominating several candidates in addition to reviewing external applications, which this year included 27 nationalities.
The first cycle of artists culminated in an exhibition in 2024 in Rome at the Institut Français and in a hotel. Beyond that, Louise Vendel did an exhibition in a deconstructed church, shifting its typical black and blue palette to Tuscan orange and yellow. Jade Tang did a large-scale piece about Tuscan vegetation, presented at DRAC in France. Yoan Estevenin there was a show at Art Paris inspired by the animals on the property and the objects on the farm. dancer Solian Rios worked for two weeks on a choreography that was presented last year in different theaters.
The two artists named in this year’s June session were Taiwanese-born, New York-based composers. Shiuan Chang and Spanish-born, London-based artist Almudena Romero. They were inspired by local birds and plants, respectively.
Nominated by Kao, Chang – who has only recently recovered from a health problem – applied to work on a solo for double bass flute (an instrument two octaves lower than a “regular” flute) and was adapting his performance art project The concert of the people. His residential rhythm was reading in the morning, walking, composing and watching the sunset after dinner. His normal work days at his home in Queens are usually 8-11 hours composing and writing music to order. After rejecting the academy and the conservatory system in favor of interaction with the general public, he organized concerts in galleries and museums in New York. He recently composed a violin concerto for the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, as well as a composition reproducing the sounds of the forest for Taiwan’s Cloudgate Dance Theater (soon to tour Berlin, Turin and Singapore), in addition to creating music to accompany patients in a psychiatric hospital in Taiwan throughout the day. During the stay, he was inspired by the high frequencies of two species of owls on the property—”the sound of nature is very rich,” he admits—as well as cicadas and various bird songs. His signature is implementing a lot of glissandos, tones that move from one point to another: a kind of migrating sound.
Romero, an expert in 19th-century photographic techniques who taught and worked with museums on cyanotypes and wet collodions, was inspired by English polymathology. John Herschel‘s discoveries that led to the beginnings of color photography. As an environmentalist, she wanted to produce work without harmful chemicals like silver nitrate, instead creating with plant-based organic pigments and natural dyes, which are more fragile and transient in their results (and less archivally secure), but without the risk of contamination. Sustainability and working with nature is something she has always been steeped in, coming from many generations of organic orange farmers in Valencia. “I think my practice aligns very well with the ethos of growing seeds,” she says.
She did two types of research during her stay: extracting pigments from plants in the summer garden, including purple cabbage, onion skins, beetroot, spinach and turmeric – making the shades more alkaline with sodium bicarbonate or more acidic with vinegar, then seeing how the colors change when the leaves are placed (also from the sun-covered surface and the garden’s left-over juices). “fossils of our time”. She is also looking at the chromatic green tones and growing crop cycle of barley, rye and wheat grown on the same patch of land, functioning as a kind of “cultivated photograph”, which she plants with her eye on previous darkroom equipment. Her current exhibition in Toulouse, “The Eye”, (part of Agricultural Photo Series) is a one-hectare installation of a human eye fashioned in a French field using nothing but wheat and winter grass.
Marmiesse says that Ebbio is “our laboratory. It’s very important that artists have the safe space to be able to experiment. They are free to create and also to relax… We really believe that artists are the solution to many of the world’s issues.” If that sounds hyperbolic — and indeed the IDA’s mantra is a cheerleader, “art can do it” — she qualifies, “they allow us all to see either the things we don’t want to see or can’t see. Sometimes it’s hard, but (it can be) honestly and smartly in a world where everything can be protected with this money. voices are heard.”
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