Artist
Eva Maria
Eva Maria Bouillon (b. 1997) currently lives and works in Bruges, Belgium. In 2019, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and Photography from the LUCA School of Arts, followed by a Master’s degree in 2020. Her work probes at the relationship between storytelling, family history and personal experience. In recent years, her work has featured in several group exhibitions and international film festivals.
House for Two
The main focus in Eva Maria’s work is on how to tell a story. When she delved into her family history, she became intrigued by hearing the same stories repeated but from different perspectives. She wondered how she could detach family events from personal experiences and make them relatable to the viewer. With this in mind, she introduced blank spaces to her narrative. These blanks might assume the form of empty or white spaces in photographs, silences in audios and stillnesses in videos. This leaves room for interpretation and potential continuations.
Memories of family events are the main starting point for Eva Maria’s video works. She comes from a small family and grew up with a close bond to her parents and grandparents. During family gatherings and conversations, she became conscious of the roles each person plays in a family by observing their gestures, gazes and subtle interactions. Often these gazes or poses would say more than the words that were spoken.
The family stories described in tableaux vivants become an open scenography. Each viewer can project their own family background or attach their own connections to family. The works not only minutely recall the unease of family gatherings but represent times past. The viewer is thus presented with time lapses that quietly confront us with our own and former generations - and what we believe we stand for.
The format hasn’t changed since the magazine’s inception in 2012. However, the project's scope has expanded significantly – .tiff has evolved into a platform, offering a year-long trajectory of presentations, conversations with experts, and exhibitions. FOMU leverages its extensive network, expertise and resources to stimulate the artists' artistic practices and personal visions.
The selection process involves reaching out to professionals in the Belgian photography scene, as well as to previous participants. This results in a long-list encompassing a diverse range of backgrounds. For this edition, FOMU departed from its usual practice and solicited the expertise of 3 external jurors: Sorana Munsya, independent curator; Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo; and Max Pinckers, .tiff alumnus and artist. Together, we carefully curated a diverse group of artists, always mindful of whether the participants would benefit from our support at this particular juncture in their careers.
This 11th edition of .tiff marks a new beginning with a fresh design, while it also safeguards its strengths. Throughout the years, .tiff has fostered a thriving Belgian photography community that transcends language barriers, enabling rich exchanges of ideas between artists, curators and critics. The current selection exemplifies the continued growth of this community, and Belgian photography’s ability to reinvent itself year after year.