Ciné32 and Bruits d'Couloir are pleased to exhibit the works from the series VENUS D'AILLEURS by the Gers photographer Isabelle Souriment.
In the manner of science fiction writers and filmmakers, Isabelle Souriment provokes critical reflection on the current world by creating poetic and funny images of an imaginary future, where wild animals from distant lands (Tropics, poles, etc.) populate landscapes of temperate zones (France, Denmark, etc.).
These virtual manipulations that the artist makes the images undergo echo those that are inflicted in reality on animals by industrial breeding, genetic research, cloning and which have definitively transformed our living conditions. Can we not put forward the hypothesis that nature and the animal question us because their status now places them as close as possible to a reality that we transform, wild species that we reintroduce into a monitored environment, where the natural can only survive enclosed?
Paradoxically, these paintings exude a heavenly atmosphere, in the literal sense of the term; paradise comes from the Persian via the Greek paradeisos, which means "enclosed park where wild animals are found".
Isabelle Souriment explains her approach
"This work is an encounter, an assembly like a kind of "digital mutation", where I transport an animal to an unusual place giving free rein to the imagination. Can we not question the real place given to the animal and its environment at the present time in a society constantly modifying and manipulating the living? A society which even comes to imagine and create protected spaces, "enclosures becoming closed rooms".
My work is of this order, editing between artifices, manipulations and backups. I sometimes played on the size, the proportion of the animals in relation to the rest to give a strange side, as well as on the shadow which often remains discreet in order to sow doubt on their reality. This "digital" displacement of wild animals mutated in a landscape other than their own, thus questions the place of the wild animal in our world in artificial mutation where the "natural" can only survive enclosed?
The intention is to create through photography and its editing, a represented nature, which is no longer original, nor independent of man; it is manipulated, controlled, artificially intensified by the frenzy of the world around it. By inserting animals into an unusual landscape, I question the paradoxes between the "romantic" idea of nature, its "reality" and our "power" over it."
ISABELLE SMILE
"Photography is my main tool, but I also add texts, objects, sounds... Depending on the subjects, I have a documentary approach, I want to capture authenticity but sometimes I construct scenes to better grasp their meaning, or to raise questions, or allow an escape... This is the field I am interested in reaching. Not to tell stories, but rather to question our relationship to the world and to ourselves.
This additional glance provoked by a doubt about what we are looking at can allow another dimension, that of questioning, of personal positioning in the face of a world in perpetual motion.
I sometimes try to make the image "come out of its frame", as if to better grasp its reality and its ambiguity between reality and fiction and its reflection on our inner world confronted with the outside.
My work is a reflection on the image involving a possible but non-systematic narration. My photography captures a distorted reality leaving the field open to a second look. This ambiguous relationship between the real and the imaginary constitutes the basis of my inspiration in order to capture the essential, its field of speech in a freeze frame."
Date
Open from December 19, 2024 to February 16, 2025
Open at film screening times.
Admission fees
Free