Valérie Vagabonde

Biographie

The École nationale supérieure de la photographie d'Arles (ENSP) is a national public institution, created in 1982 under an associative status and placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture since 1 January 2004.
In the network of higher artistic education establishments under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture, the ENSP is the only school devoted to teaching and research on photography and images. This specificity makes it unique at the national level and a reference at the international level, on the one hand for the diversity and quality of its technical teaching linked to the very nature of the medium, and on the other hand, for its capacity to embrace a plurality of artistic practices around images, to question them and to develop a critical sense in its educational approaches.
The school continues its high quality teaching and research activities with the Master's degree or the VAE (Validation of acquired experience), but also through the doctorate in partnership with Aix-Marseille University, the Mentoring programme dedicated to national and international artists, and also thanks to continuing professional training.
In 2022, the ENSP celebrates the 40th anniversary of its creation. During this period, the stakes of the artistic practice of photography and its teaching have been profoundly transformed. To say vehemently today that images constitute a large part of our experience of the world is not an exaggeration: the space of our contemporary life is saturated with images of various natures, hybrid and moving.
The responsibility of the Arles School is now to respond to these challenges (technical, artistic, social, political and scientific) by offering emancipatory courses that take into account all these phenomena of constant change in the medium and in society. In this way, students are provided with critical and technical tools that favour their full integration into a professional life rich in possibilities of innovation and discernment.

Présentation

This is the story of Valerie, a woman who lives alone in a cabin in the middle of the forest since she lost her job in an art foundry a few years ago. She is surrounded by a bunch of characters that I discover as I go along. Who are they really?