The landscape and its stories

The theme of the seventh edition of the Institut’s Grant is The landscape and its stories. 
The very essence of landscape is conducive to visual representation but over the past two decades, the notion of landscape has been challenged. 
Two main directions are highlighted in this reflection on landscape Photography. The ecological approach encourages us to consider the general deantropization movement of our environment, opening up to new forms of observation and reflection on the non-human world. The second, political approach, which studies the relationships between landscape and social order, questioning, among other things, the assigned place of humans in the landscape.
Conceiving an image of landscape, opening the door to new experiences of landscape, conjuring up its origins, narratives, and myths…

Learn more about the theme

Marie Blanc

© Zoé Poli

IIntimate or editorialized: selling, showing, telling the story of the trip to Czechoslovakia through the photographed landscape

The notion of narrative is at the heart of tourist publications: travel narratives, narratives of proximity or exoticism, narratives of tourist happiness, not to mention economic and political narratives. With this in mind, this research project focuses on the images of landscapes found in both tourist publications and private travel books dedicated to Czechoslovakia and produced for or by foreign travellers during the Cold War.
The first aim of this project is to identify how different tourism narratives can be expressed and read in landscape photography. Landscape photography plays a key role on the pages: it shows, describes, narrates or serves to promote the destination. By comparing editorial work and personal albums, the aim is to highlight the stylistic and discursive features common to landscape photography that both frame and inform travellers’ individual experiences. In particular, it will analyse the differences in the way natural and urban landscapes are represented, as they do not convey the same narratives. Another aspect of this research project is the circulation of these photographs, both in terms of media (from photo-illustrated books to photographic travel albums) and geopolitics (from one space to another). In the context of the ideological conflict between socialist and capitalist states, the aim is to explore the hypothesis of landscape photography as a means of observing the porosity between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Is the photographed landscape the site of ideological confrontation or stylistic and generic sharing? In short, is there such a thing as a socialist landscape?

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Marie Blanc is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Grenoble Alpes, in the LARHRA laboratory, under the supervision of Paula Barreiro López (FRAMESPA) and Christian Joschke (HAR). Her thesis deals with the production, reception and circulation of tourist images of Czechoslovakia in the context of the Cold War, based on a transmedia visual corpus (travel guides, magazines, illustrated books, postcards, amateur photographs, etc.). A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon and the University of Paris X Nanterre La Défense, she was an exhibition assistant at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (2019/2020) and teaches contemporary art history at the Université Louis Lumière Lyon 2 and the Université Grenoble Alpes. 

Find Marie Blanc’s work on her website Larhra and this Bluesky profile.

Rebekka Deubner

© Rebekka Deubner

The loving earth (literally, the soil that sticks to your boots)

The loving earth (literally, the soil that sticks to your boots) outlines a view of a contemporary, disparate rural area at a pivotal moment in its evolution. For years, the Deux-Sèvres department (France) has been the backdrop to a struggle over water and how to share it. Today, it has come to a head with the construction of ‘water reservoirs’ for some and ‘mega basins’ for others, culminating in Sainte-Soline II in March 2023. Beyond this territory, they represent conflicting perspectives: on the one hand, exploitation, and on the other, cohabitation in our relationship with living things, with the land and with agriculture.
Rebekka Deubner is interested in the out-of-camera range of the visible struggle, to grasp what leads up to it in the background. She allows this territory and its ecosystems to permeate her, as much through solitary wandering as through encounters with people who have a close relationship with it. Through the seasons, she creates a panorama of interrelated gestures and spaces. The aim is to show both the landscape and the hands that shape it. “How does it feel to own a territory? The question posed by the ecology of Neil Evernden has nothing to do with sentimentality but with how our territory is inscribed in us and how we inscribe ourselves in it. This possession is one of assimilation and projection, of a blurring of boundaries.” (Invasives, C. Curiol) 
She learns to understand space through conversations with local residents. They teach her that it is far from silent, that every component, every form of water, every plot of land, every animal tells her about the state of the land, the way it is inhabited, worked or exploited by hand or machine.

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Rebekka Deubner’s photographic work embodies her exploration of human and non-human bodies, their relationship, their mutations and their interdependence. Whether on the scale of deeply political practices such as contraception, a personal bereavement, or a disaster in the Fukushima prefecture, her gaze lingers on gesture, skin and imprint to convey what binds and engages in a sensitive form.
Since studying the history of art and photography, she has exhibited her work at Le BAL, Villa Noailles, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris Photo and the Arts & Industrie Triennial Chaleur humaine in Dunkirk. Her work is frequently published in book form, either self-published or in collaboration with publishers such as September Books, Art Paper Editions and Sasori Books.

Find Rebekka Deubner’s work on her website and this Instagram profile.

Alejandro León Cannock

© Daniel Roble

Landscapes by extraction. An iconographic survey of territories in the Global South : the case of Latin America

The scientific community agrees that we are in the sixth mass extinction. This planetary crisis is the result of a cultural ethosstructured by the logic of extractivist thinking, which forms the basis of the ‘cannibalism’ (N. Fraser) inherent in capitalist society. This is why it is ethically more correct and epistemologically more rigorous to describe our era as the ‘Capitalocene’ rather than the ‘Anthropocene.’ Since their ‘discovery’ in 1492, the territories of the ‘New World’ have been subjected to a systematic and disproportionate process of dispossession by the European imperial and colonial powers. The life forms that inhabit them have undergone an onto-economic reduction that has turned them into mere ‘resources’, legitimising the expropriation of natural materials, the exploitation of human labour and the appropriation of cultural expressions. 532 years after this ‘eclipse of the Other’ (E. Dussel), scientific data demonstrates the continuing drain of resources from the countries of the South to those of the North (J. Hickel).

This curatorial research project proposes a visual archaeology of extractivist thought to shed light on the ideological underpinnings of the current planetary crisis. Three narratives will structure this investigation:

↘ Landscape by extraction (21st century): explores artistic narratives that challenge the environmental degradation caused by extractivism in the region 

↘ Landscape by sublimation’ (16th-18th century): explores the literary and iconographic narratives that have reduced American ecosystems to mere resources 

↘ Landscape by usurpation (19th-20th century): explores the photographic narratives that documented the modernisation of European states through the extraction of wealth from their colonies

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With a PhD in artistic research from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles and AMU, he currently teaches at Aix-Marseille University.
His current research explores the strategies employed by contemporary artistic activity, particularly in the field of photography, to question extractivist thinking, while proposing an ecosophical ethos. 
Curator of the Peruvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024, he also curated Barbara Brändli. Poetics of gesture, politics of the document (PhotoEspaña 2024) and Voir par contact. Photogrammes 2014-2024, and has notably published Voir / Savoir. Photographic practice as artistic research (Marges. Revue d’art contemporain, 2024)

Find Alejandro León Cannock’s work on his website, and this Instagram profile, Facebook page and Linkedin.

Simon Ripoll-Hurier

© Myriam Lefkowitz 

Galaxy

From the sky to the ground and through the ether, Galaxy is an exploration of a family’s land east of Santerre, on the border between the Somme and the Aisne (France). In this flat landscape, the horizontal line separating the sky and the land gives the impression of a “membrane landscape”. What if the air and the ground here were more inhabited than we think? What if the membrane began to vibrate and sound?
This choral research takes as its terrain a parachuting club, an agronomy institute and a group of underground explorers, and as its medium the re-creation of an old local radio station, Galaxie.
We’ll watch bodies fall from the sky, others develop underground, others measure and study them, while voices and stories will pass through the medium waves to spread through the air and settle on the landscape, composing an esoteric plot, a fragile pathway to a local otherworld.
As part of the Institut’s Grant, and in parallel with a feature-length documentary project currently in development, Simon Ripoll-Hurier will produce and map a range of materials and put them into narratives and space. Video, sound, text and photographic objects will be combined in the form of installations, performances and editions.

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Somewhere between visual art, cinema and sound creation, (co-founder of *DUUU radio), Simon Ripoll-Hurier’s work is shown at festivals, in exhibitions and on the radio. His first film, Diana (2017), brought together groups of radio amateurs, birdwatchers and ghost hunters, like so many listening practices in search of the tiniest signals in a sea of parasites. Age of Heroes (2020) portrays a Macedonian symphony orchestra recording the soundtracks of films from all over the world. And The Signal Line (2024) is a sensitive investigation into the links between clairvoyance and Silicon Valley, based around remote viewing, a parapsychic practice created by the CIA during the Cold War. Alongside his research into Reality Shifting, he is currently exploring the Picardy region (France).

Find Simon Ripoll-Hurier’s work on his website and this Instagram profile.