The Rencontres d'Arles 2022 have two major themes, one on feminism through the prism of performance, the other on ecology with eight exhibitions that question our connection to the earth, to trees, to first peoples.
"The human being is at the heart of the first attentions, but nature is also in the spotlight: impossible to envisage one without the other", declares Christoph Wiesner, director of the Rencontres d'Arles.
Latin America features in several exhibits.
To discover
Suri Cruise: Hollywood's spoiled little girl, or the story of a child demonized by the media
Diving in Mapuche territory
With “Geometric Forests.
Struggles in Mapuche territory» (1), the Franco-Chilean collective Ritual Inhabitual (Tito Gonzales Garcia, Florencia Grisanti) teleports the visitor to the forests of Aracaunia, in the south of the country.
There, industrial exploitation, in the form of geometric forests to supply the paper industry, pushes the Mapuche community (literally People of the Earth) further and further away from its territory.
For two centuries, this people has been fighting against the exploitation of the natural resources of their native land.
The photographic investigation demonstrates the consequences of forest monoculture (pines and eucalyptus), such as the disappearance of the medicinal plants of the Mapuche shamans.
Beyond this issue, the work of Ritual Inhabitual offers a reflection on our consumption and its environmental impact.
Full screen
Paul Filutraru, rapper of the group Wechekeche ñi Trawün.
(Santiago de Chile, 2016.) Unusual Ritual
Tree Portraits
Note, on the sidelines of this exhibition at the chapel of Méjan, that of Léa Haboudin entitled “Images-Forêts: worlds in extension” (2).
The 34-year-old photographer starts from an observation: the primary forests that appeared on our planet 380 million years ago are in danger, the human species making them gradually disappear.
Traveling for two years through preserved places and woods in France, she produced portraits of trees that celebrate the beauty of the forests.
To represent them, she chose a non-toxic, non-polluting printing technique.
This uses chlorophyll extracted from flowers and plants to fix the images.
But these prints change under the effect of daylight, passing during the summer through the entire chromatic range until they fade away.
L'
enchantment of images giving way to the consequences of human actions.
A look at impermanence...
Full screen
Forest-images: expanding worlds
, screen printing, oak bark and charcoal pigments.
Lea Habourdin
(1) “Geometric Forests.
Struggles in Mapuche territory”, Ritual Unusual, Chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan, until September 25.
(2) “Forest Images: expanding worlds”, Léa Haboudin, Croisière, until 25 September.