Biographie
Born in 1977 in Saint-Étienne, I have been living and working in Paris for twenty years. Without diploma or training, I accumulate small handling jobs until my thirties. I learn the profession of photographer late, self-taught, and only recently show my series. Chance or cunning of life, in 2012, the University Paris-Sorbonne asks me to set up a photographic workshop for its students. Thus, for about ten years, I have been dividing my time between creation, curation, and teaching. I work today at Paris 1, Paris 3, Paris 4, Science Po Paris. Rather a plastician, my practice is oriented towards reflections related to the format of the image and tries to develop a grammar centered on the polyptych and what the association of images allows as new forms. Feeling close to the Land-Artist approach, I also develop most of my projects with the ambition to present them outside and in an ephemeral way. Thus in 2015 I installed my series "le Léthé" all along the Ourcq canal in Paris, images on locks, bridges, banks. In 2020, I am handcrafting my series 'l'Achéron' in 100 copies, a book sealed and thrown into the largest European rivers to let the current swallow them or make them run aground at random from the banks and encounters. In parallel with these plastic experiments, I make documentaries whose subjects question different figures of marginality. Since 2022, I have been documenting the Innu Indian reserves of the eastern provinces of Canada. This exhibition is an excerpt from an exhibition carried by Stimultania in Strasbourg. In collaboration with the musée ilnu de Mashteuiatsh where the project archives are kept. With the support of the Québec Government Office in Paris and the Institut français. In Canada, this documentary was supported and supervised by the Mashteuiatsh museum, one of the main Innu institutions. It is also co-funded by the consulates of France and Canada and a laureate of the "France-Québec cooperation" program.
Exhibitions
2021: 'Rimbaud', Simultaneous installations in the stations of Paris- Marseille and Charlevilles-Mézières
2022: «Rimbaud», BNF, «La photographie à tout prix», Paris.
Publication
2023: "A.R.", Edition "Loco". France
Acquisition
2025: BNF collection, acquisition of 10 prints
Présentation
Nitassinan (our land) is the name given by the Innu to a territory that extends from the banks of the St. Lawrence River to the edges of the boreal regions of eastern Canada. Nitassinan is rich, rich in game, woods, minerals, the paradise of beasts, men and spirits, to the point that everyone has desired this territory, for 10,000 years at least, and until today still... First of the North American first nations to meet white travelers in the 16th century, those once called «Montagnais» welcome these newcomers and soon more or less fair exchanges are created, there is room for everyone, think, on Nitassinan. Quite quickly, the Innu move from the fundamental freedom of the hunter to the narrow constraints of the trapper: the Europeans like furs and pay a lot for them. The spaces are shrinking. Increasingly the effects of this excessive hunting push the Innu on the coast of the St. Lawrence, in contact with the counters, the missionaries and traders profit from it, multiplying scams, evangelizations, and when the forest industry adds to their exile, Nitassinan, already, is nothing but skin of sorrow. Three centuries later, it is the coup de grâce: the Innu, considered by the authorities as savages to be civilized will now be governed by the law on the Indians: deeply assimilationist text that prohibits traditional ceremonies, costumes, and languages. In the same vein, the Innu are encouraged to gather in prefabricated villages, isolated, always controlled and especially poorly financed. Finally, at the height of this racist policy, a residential school program is launched, forcing all indigenous young people under 15 years to attend a Catholic school often hundreds of kilometers from their place of life and whose avowed goal is to cut them as much as possible from their roots. Living conditions are terrible: in addition to the lack of food, there are also the transmission of diseases, excessive work, brutality and rape: it is estimated that about 6,000 children died (out of 150,000 placed) in these establishments until the 1990s. Thirty years after this ultimate trauma, what about those we call the laughing people? To this question when it is asked, one and the same reaction: «we are still here». Indeed, the Innu resist, develop, seek to self-determine, everywhere its members multiply political, economic and cultural initiatives, everywhere they seek to reconquer an identity that was or wanted to make them believe was extinct. It is to document this renewal that between 2022 and 2025 I regularly visited 7 of the 11 communities of the Innu nation, depicting in turn and according to different seasons, its members, its living conditions, the state of the surrounding territory. These communities are (from west to east): Mashteuiatsh (Pointe-Bleue), Essipit (les Escoumins), Pessamit (Betsiamites), Uashatmak mani-utenam (Sept-Îles), Matimekush (Schefferville), Nutashkuan (Natashquan), Unamen-Shipu (La Romaine).