Conviviality

“Conviviality” is a research project started in February 2024, combining photography, text, archives and video.

It emanates from the following question: reluctantly acknowledging Anthropocene as a given, considering furthermore the environmental fallout of the practice of photography, how is it possible to keep on narrating stories with this medium without renoucing the ethical and ecological behaviour imposed on me by my will to stop contributing to the destruction of living things?

This research consist of:

• a first chapter made up of field notes collected at the farm, edited on a regular basis;

Conviviality
Chapter 1 (notes)

• a second chapter, in which a possible way of working finally seems to emerge, while reviving the artistic attempt at the core of the series “Explanation, Peace, Forgetfulness”, that was silenced by the April 2015 earthquake;

Conviviality
Chapter 2 (home)

• a third chapter resulting of an attempt to reutilise the archive inherited when buying the farm, inspired by two photographs by Catherine Poncin reproduced by Danièle Méaux in Photographie contemporaine & Anthropocène (Filigranes, 2022);

Conviviality
Chapter 3 (archive)

• a series of twelve films, each one of a twelve minutes duration, collected at the farm. So far six of them have been created.

Conviviality
12 x 12 (films)

• a work diary (in French) meant to keep track of the questions, answers and contradictions encountered along the way, as well as texts exploring certain aspects of these questions in greater depths ;

 

“Conviviality” is an artistic research about the possibility of photographing in the Anthropocene, initiated out of necessity and pursued thanks to a grant by the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles of the French ministry of Culture. The title of this research, “Conviviality”, is a direct quotation of Ivan Illich’s book, Tools for Conviviality (Harper and Row, 1973).