On the banks of the Rio Tinto in Spain or near the former arsenic mine in Salsigne, Coline Jourdan undertakes an “archeology of the toxic.” If toxicity is generally imperceptible, what role can photography play in its representation? How might it claim to depict it? To visualize it, Coline Jourdan combines documentary investigation with artistic experimentation. She gathers documents and testimonies; most recently, for *Soulever la poussière* (Stirring Up the Dust), a body of work dedicated to the former gold and arsenic mine in Salsigne, she has enlisted the collaboration of scientists, whose research processes and testimonies she records, consulted departmental archives, and delved into the iconography of the site’s past glory. Just like this gathering of information, her photography becomes a collection of traces. Here we discover a collection of small stones, there a few plant specimens, and suddenly, on what we recognize as a slag heap, the emergence of points of incandescence on the surface of the image. This is because his photography sometimes literally serves as a medium for collecting samples from the explored terrain: for example, he occasionally dips his film into the water of the nearby river. What the territory contains is then symbolically revealed in the thickness of the photographic material, to the point of exuding from it.
Coline Jourdan, born in 1993, lives and works in Rouen, Normandy. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Dijon in 2017. Her work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions (Musée Nicéphore Niepce as part of the Ateliers Vortex Photographic Print Award in 2019; Festival de La Gacilly, Baden, Austria, 2021; Artefacts, (Résidence 1+2), Chapelle des Cordeliers, Toulouse, 2020; Les noirceurs du fleuve rouge, Galerie Full B1, Rouen, 2019). In 2021, she received the CNAP’s Support for Contemporary Documentary Photography, as well as individual creation funding from the Normandy Region. That same year, she was awarded the 50CC Air de Normandie artist grant.
