EVENTS AROUND THE EXHIBITION
Public meeting moderated by Andreina De Bei, deputy editor-in-chief Sciences et Avenir La Recherche.
NEWS
Exhibition supported by the DRAC Grand Est, the Grand Est Region and the City of Strasbourg.
In partnership with The 1+2 Residence, supported by the Ministry of Culture, ADAGP, CNRS, STIMULTANIA Pôle de photographie, CASDEN, and PICTO FOUNDATION, with media partners Fisheye and Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche.
Residence 1+2, the Ministry of Culture, ADAGP, CNRS, Stimultania Pôle de Photographie, CASDEN and PICTO Fondation are joining forces to present the first two winners of the Photography & Sciences prize (whose General Delegate is Philippe Guionie, director of the Residence 1+2 in Toulouse).
Paris, the jury met for the second time. Everyone had opened their files on the finder or spread out piles of blackened papers. We would agree in three hours, but, for the moment, we had our ideas, preferences already. Philippe Guionie played the role of attentive and fraternal host. It was the second time and I had thought of champagne, to celebrate the first. Everything is in order they said afterwards, shaking hands. It will be striking. And they really meant it.
So there were two of them. The first had been appointed a year earlier. He had wanted to go far away because he had decided that his project was there and that this island would be an allegory of the world. Nauru, he said simply. Maybe he wanted to see the ocean (the abrasive rocks and the withered palms). But no one ever entered this island, and he had to wait months for a visa. Later, the jury had hung up his postcard. tell, I said. He had told.
The second knew very well. From the sky she had plunged her eyes into the sea. She had read somewhere that the five trillion submarine microplastics outnumbered the stars in our galaxy. And she had only thought about that. Thunderstruck. Patiently, she had decided to list the micro-organisms of the oceans. It would constitute an abyssal herbarium and already saw the staging: there would be no glass jellyfish but phyto and zooplankton in suspension (like samples).
What a great idea this price, Philip.
One day, we will say to ourselves: it would be better not to think about this shipwrecked island and particles , to these two artists and to the scientists at their side, but how can I forget them?… Hi, your work is beautiful but it still pains me.
Celine Duval
Richard Pak, 2021 winner, continues his cycle Islands of Desire. After The Firm (Tristan da Cunha, 2016-2017) and The archipelago of the third sex (Polynesia, 2022), The shipwrecked island (Nauru, 2022-2023) is the third chapter. The series recounts the ravaged landscapes of the micro-nation of Micronesia, devastated by excessive phosphate mining. Manon Lanjouère, 2022 winner, spent a month aboard the scientific schooner Tara between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro to observe research on microbiomes. She continues her project entitled The particles at the Roscoff Biological Station. This project sheds light on ocean plastic pollution and its impact on microorganisms. The two winners have produced sublime and disconcerting works, in front of which the viewer passes from wonder to amazement.
The shipwrecked island
Nauru, in Oceania, has gone from the richest country to one of the poorest in the world in less than twenty years. The history of the world's smallest republic looks like a literary fiction in which delusions of grandeur and greed have transformed a paradise island into an ecological, economic and social disaster.
The Prix Photographie & Sciences allowed Richard Pak to deepen, with the help of the CIRIMAT laboratory (CNRS, Toulouse), an experimental chemical process that he had developed, consisting in subjecting photographic negatives to a solution of Phosphoric acid. Like the island, these originals thus “sacrificed” in phosphate emerge irremediably transformed and impoverished. The aesthetic rendering takes us towards (science) fiction or mythological fable.
The characters of The shipwrecked island, princes and princesses, weightlifters and beauty queens, are accompanied by a ballet of sweepers struggling to chase the phosphate dust from the surface of the island. Rusting carcasses and abandoned gas stations loop the length of the country's only circular road, like oxidized icons of a short-term society.
The artist also asked a geographer and a specialist in international relations to whom he asked if Nauru could be seen as an allegory of the entire planet or if the case was too specific. Exposure to Stimultania will reveal their respective responses.
The shipwrecked island also received financial support from the Cnap (Support for contemporary documentary photography, 2020) and La Fondation des Artistes (Aid for the production of works of art, 2020).
The particles
The particles proposes to enter the motionless layer of the waters, to lift the shroud over the invisible peoples and to plunge the spectator into an abyss of reflection.
Whether aboard the scientific schooner Tara or at the Roscoff biological station, Manon Lanjouère was able to discover the microscopic organisms inhabiting the ocean. Through her discussions with scientists and visual exploration – via technologies such as optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and/or 3D fluorescence microscopy as well as the accumulation of reference images she has collected in the library – the artist learned about the composition of phytoplankton (DNA, chlorophyll, etc.) and its importance in the organization of our ecosystem. Macro and microalgae, studied at the Roscoff Biological Station, are in fact responsible for 40% of the absorption of carbon dioxide and more than 60% of the production of oxygen, a phenomenal and chilling result. given their vulnerability to microplastics.
Manon Lanjouère invents here the composition of the world of tomorrow: plastic materials, recovered on beaches or in garbage cans, become the new representative form of microbiomes and planktons. I'emiliania huxleyi becomes an agglomeration of shower strainers, the guinardia striata a simple hair elastic, the limmophora a set of drink stirrers…
Drawing inspiration from the herbarium British Algae by Anna Atkins, or the sublime boards of Ernst Haeckel, his productions are nothing but a dialectical tension between the sublime and the derisory of a nature damaged by the hand of man. Oscillating between a scientific, documentary and plastic posture, Manon Lanjouère uses the process of cyanotype on glass and adds fluorescent paint to it to recall the bioluminescence of certain species of plankton. The visitor falls into a full psychedelic delirium: the rooms, colored with white light, light up with the passage of black light.
Richard pak is a multidisciplinary author born in France in 1972. His protean and constantly evolving work stubbornly refuses categorization. Documentary photography, plastic research, summoning of the story or the video mean that Richard Pak rarely takes us where we expect it to be. From his first series he was interested in representing intimacy in the private (Pursuit, Les Frèrespareil) and public (Les Fiancés, Je ne croirai un Dieu qui danse) spheres. And when he shares the daily life of those he photographs, it is to free himself from the border between the viewer and the watched, from inside and outside. Observing how his contemporaries live and representing the struggle for life weave the common thread of his artistic research, but he is also interested in the question of the photographic landscape. Curious about the complexity of the world and in love with the distance, he began an anthology on the insular space: “the island is the fictional seat of utopia, the ideal laboratory of modern sciences and a precious topos for the geographer, who likes to see it as a metonymy of the Earth ”. The first chapter of this cycle (Islands of desire) takes us to Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the South Atlantic (La Firme). His photographs are part of public and private collections including that of the National Library of France.
Born in 1993, Manon Lanjouere lives and works in Paris. After a course in Art History at the Sorbonne, she decided to devote herself fully to photography and joined the Ecole des Gobelins in 2014 from where she graduated in 2017 in the majors of her class. Due to his parallel evolution within a Parisian theater, his practice of photography is marked by staging and decor and tends to evolve towards a multiple practice, mixing sounds, photographs, installations, sculptures. Her reading-driven work focuses on depicting fictional worlds. The distance with the narrative implied by the use of scientific expressions, although most often they are only simple vulgarizations or re-interpretations, thus allow the spectator to appropriate the stories that it stages. . The scientific and the poetic, yet diametrically opposed, are the two engines of his artistic research. In the various subjects she addresses, the attempt to understand the interaction between the landscape and the human remains central.
FOR FURTHER
PODCASTS
In order to continue the dialogue initiated by the Prix Photographie et Sciences, scientists are invited by the CNRS regional delegation to take a look at The shipwrecked island by Richard Pak and The particles by Manon Lanjouère.
Directed by: Magali Sarazin for the Alsace delegation of the CNRS
Editing: Campus FM Toulouse and Philippe Guionie for the Photography & Sciences Prize
Guests: Frederic Bolze, biochemist at the Laboratory for the Design and Application of Bioactive Molecules (CAMB), research unit of the CNRS and the University of Strasbourg
Sandrine Glatron, CNRS geographer at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory in Cultural Studies (LinCS), research unit of the CNRS and the University of Strasbourg and director of the Urban Environmental Workshop Zone of Strasbourg
Luke Averous, chemist at the Institute of Chemistry and Processes for Energy, Environment and Health, ICPEES, research unit of the CNRS and the University of Strasbourg, and professor at the European School of Chemistry, Polymers and Materials , ECPM, engineering school of the University of Strasbourg
