Daniela Belinga Agossa is a swiss visual artist, initiator and director of the artspace + residencies. After having initiated and/or organised/co-organised several art expos and festivals in forgotten places in Switzerland and the USA, she decided to buy this well situated building in the heart of the  thermal springs area of Bourbonne-les-Bains. Fortuitously found and bought with her retirement pension capital, as her holiday residency,  the site uncovers its riches more each day. Of very rich mythology and more solid witnesses of the oldest past, notably in the water landscape, the place is a point of sprouting in a digitalized world, where the nowhere can become the everywhere. Such offering an openness to the mind with its ability of imagination and assisting the transformation of the artists and the guests.

EAC Les Thermes was established in France by D.B.A. creating the ATAW non profit association, with office members Esther Belinga and Anna Karniej, in 2018.

Official opening was in spring 2019 with its first artists in residency inaugurating the place with the celebration of a group show called ¨DÉPART ET ARRRIVÉE¨.

This first exhibition showed works of the following artists: Pierre Bongiovanni, Charles François Duplain, Sithabile Mlotshwa, Philippe Queloz, Yves Tauvel. They all have been actively involved in and/or are still working as initiators and directors of art projects, in their respective countries.  

This approach was the appropriate start in making it possible to connect the world, the nowhere and the everywhere.

The aim

of our centre is to link Bourbonne-Les-Bains to all the world, by offering international artists, theorists, scientists the space and time they need to produce relevant work, which can be shown connected to artists from the region,  pointing on developing new ways of understanding  and connection through exploring older and newer realities of all kinds. 

The white/pink cow

used as the sign of  EAC Les Thermes+ residences d’artistes, links to Damona, the female water spirit from gallo romain times, remaining very present in the local community, protecting the healing waters and though the ill and tired spa guests getting water treatment. 

Damona is also called ¨the big cow¨ and her attributes are the snakes and the eggs thus linking again to many other female water and fertility spirits all over the globe.