Nolwenn Brod

Anaïs Boileau, whose activity is divided between work for the international press and personal work, was assiduously engaged during the confinement in plastic experiments. The resulting photographs are a kind of palimpsest of her photography, striking a subtle balance between the documentary aspect of her practice and her undiminished appetite for shapes, colours, materials and their interactions. Deploying her studio outdoors, she places everyday objects and materials within the frame of her photography, which she then brings to life, sometimes seeking harmony, sometimes dissonance. Sometimes, she supports the pictoriality by introducing paint, blurring a little more this play of surfaces. What is then printed on the skin of the image is as much the result of her gesture of composition as the effect of the indelible imprint of the Mediterranean sun, the primary subject of all her photography.

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Nolwenn Brod's practice does not play with formal experimentation in its current sense, no overflow towards sculpture, painting or any other way out. It is a mining photography, which digs into its subject, in the duration, in the thickness of the blacks of the photographic image. As the projects follow one another, we observe the photographer in search of her relationship with the other, a journey for which photography is both the witness and the vehicle. The elsewhere of the residency, the exogenous anchoring point that it embodies, constitutes her privileged mode of operation. Recently in Beirut, Lebanon, in Lodz, Poland, or more recently in Brest, France, she slowly enters into a relationship, according to the encounters, which soon take shape in photographs, in the depths of the being and its contrary movements, between vulnerability and strength, fragility and affirmation. To the portraits, she adds fragments of bodies, details, nocturnal landscapes in the half-light, fragmented interiors, like so many points of this delicate cartography of the elsewhere that constitutes the other. The work is done in the length of the relationship and soon also in that of the filmic space which she decides to invest fully for her latest project Les hautes solitudes. 

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Pauline Hisbacq's images take their place in the great white of the page; frail presences, in appearance. 

Whether she is the author of the photographs, as in many of her projects, or whether she makes use of archival images gleaned from the Internet, she applies the same gesture: she samples, deliberately focusing on the fragment. By its very nature, the photographic image is framed in a way that does not hide the hand's gesture or its imperfections. The fragment is then placed on a single sheet of paper, often in correspondence with another composition, in the pages of a book (the editorial form is dear to the artist) or on the exhibition wall. Recently, Pauline Hisbacq shared her Songs for Women and Birds, a series of collages tracing her reading of the first large-scale feminist and environmentalist movement that took place in Great Britain in the early 1980s. From the archive images, she retains those in which gestures of solidarity are prominent and deliberately avoids explicit illustrations of repression and violence, only a few framed primers surreptitiously recalling them. The interplay of hands, the interlacing of arms, the embraces call for our full attention. In this space of the sheet, Pauline Hisbacq then takes us, as she was able to search for the image among the flow of the Internet, to make our own way towards the image, towards the history of the relationships of sorority and mixed power that unfold there, and to listen to the voices, songs and cries of which this large white space is an echo. The murmur of the image, with its discreet hold on the page, and the modesty of the tool, photocopy and scissors, make a great noise in her work and are enough in themselves to open up a new mode of narration. 

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‍Coline Jourdan recently undertook a residency in the South of France, in a project that is both documentary and visual - Raising the Dust - which explores an old arsenic mine and the visible and invisible impacts of the pollution caused by its exploitation. The photographer had already expressed her desire to image the natural landscape altered by human action. Her first works immediately took the path of experimentation, attempting to make a direct imprint of the polluted landscape on the surface of the film by immersion. Her documentary requirements quickly led her to make her approach more complex and to take care to avoid any systematism in these experiments. The photographic treatment of the image will then give prevalence to the narrative capacity and the experimentation will be carried out in a strict rigour of appropriateness, welcome in a photographic artistic landscape over-saturated with plastic experiments carried out on the account of ecological disasters. Rather than the immersion of the medium, of the film, it is our own that she engages with Raising the Dust. She now handles several types of images: sober frontal shots are applied to the rocks that have been removed, large colour landscapes unfold a seemingly sublime nature, other black and white shots reintroduce the scientific gesture... So many layers that translate the cohabitation of ambivalent realities and feelings in the perimeter of the mine and its surroundings.