Founded at 9 French Place, Shoreditch, London — FRENCH PLACE enters its next chapter in Milan, where our programme extends across exhibitions, an artist residency, and research–driven initiatives that support deep engagement with contemporary practice.
Founded at 9 French Place, Shoreditch, London — FRENCH PLACE enters its next chapter in Milan, where our programme extends across exhibitions, an artist residency, and research–driven initiatives that support deep engagement with contemporary practice.
ARIST IN RESIDENCE,
ANNA DE CASTRO BARBOSA 13.03.26—29.04.26
From Friday 13 March to Wednesday 29 April 2026, Anna de Castro Barbosa will be in residence at FRENCH PLACE as part of the ongoing residency programme conceived as a focused period dedicated to research, production, and the development of new work in close proximity to the exhibition space. This stint is organised with the support of Third Born Gallery.
Anna de Castro Barbosa
Born in 1995 in Montpellier, Anna de Castro Barbosa lives in Paris and works in Aubervilliers, where she is a resident at Poush. After studying art history, cultural mediation and museology at the Sorbonne, she enrolled at the Beaux-Arts in Nantes and then in Paris, where she graduated in 2024 with highest honours, under the guidance of Tatiana Trouvé and Dominique Figarella. That same year, she was awarded the Diptyque Grant, the Bredin Prat Grant, and the Prix Dauphine for Contemporary Art. Her work has been presented in France in 2025 (Spiaggia Libera, Strouk, Pal Project, Art-o-rama...) as well as internationally, with solo exhibitions at Third Born Gallery in Mexico City and Mega in Milan. Her sculptural and installation-based practice explores the body, desire, and otherness.
What interests her is not the instant of contact, but the latency that precedes it: that fragile moment when attraction and unease intertwine, when seduction and repulsion reach a delicate balance. Her sculptures and installations function as thresholds - tension devices in which viewers are summoned, tested, and held in a state of alertness. Touch plays a central role: metal that retains the warmth of a palm, glass that records fingerprints, porous surfaces that hold traces of passage. While her forms sometimes draw from medical instruments, Anna de Castro Barbosa diverts their function, transforming them into ambivalent entities, halfway between prosthesis and fetish. The speculum, a recurring figure, becomes emblematic of this shift: an intrusive instrument par excellence, turned inside out to question openness, intimacy, and strangeness. In earlier works such as Speculum (2025), La démangeaison (2024), or Narcolepsia (2024), the artist developed a vocabulary in which medical gestures, eroticism, and discomfort intersect in an unsettling dramaturgy, probing both our desire for proximity and our fear of rupture.
Supported by Third Born Gallery (CDMX)
Open Studios Schedule:
19.03.26, 6—8PM
BOOK NOW
27.03.26, 7—9PM
BOOK NOW
28.03.26, 9AM—12PM
BOOK NOW