At the end of the selection process, four artists were chosen for the uniqueness of their research and artistic achievements: Gaëlle Delort (1988), Lívia Melzi (1985), Emma Tholot (1994) and Valentin Valette (1994). Although each artist has their own unique approach, they all share an interest in the document and the photographic image as a place of memory and even belief.
With Gaëlle Delort, it is the landscape of the Causses, where she lives, that is revealed through a long-term exploration using a view camera. Combining caving with her photography, she captures the geomorphology of the region in striking underground landscapes. Delving a few leagues beneath the earth we tread, she methodically probes and records the reverse side of the world we see, where the archives of the earth lie.
It is the memory of human beings and their artefacts that Lívia Melzi seeks to portray. Starting with the archives of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, destroyed by fire in 2018, she too is pursuing a long and extensive project of collecting from the reserves of ethnographic museums. Using these traces of the past, the Franco-Brazilian artist questions the future of their photographic collections.
Sediments of beliefs, the photographic image gains a range of media borrowed from the field of Mediterranean popular tradition in Emma Tholot‘s work. Her installations combine theatrical elements from religion, carnival and the circus. Migrating onto fabric, embellished with ribbons, bells, wax ex-votos, cushions and satin, the photographic image is the crucible of a collective memory with baroque accents.
Finally, the photographic document as deployed by Valentin Valette is informed by his training in visual anthropology. The Franco-Algerian artist carries out photographic projects in the Gulf countries and is particularly interested in present-day Oman. In a large fresco combining documents, photographs and sound, he portrays migrant builders and entrepreneurs. Isolated in vast desert landscapes, we discover architectures that could have come from either the distant past or the distant future. Capturing faces and traces, he depicts a territory in transition, criss-crossed by migrations whose embodied lives are often erased, and patiently constructs an archive of the time that once existed beneath these infrastructures of concrete and solar panels.