To bear witness to the world as it is, photographer Françoise Huguier (1942) has always preferred the cramped confines of modest homes to thegrandiosity of vast open spaces. Since ‘home’ is the core from which we truly inhabit the world, it is from there that she observes her contemporaries. The kitchen, bathroom and toilet are the crucibles of our lives, into which she invites herself. What if the trivial objects that pile up in small clusters reveal more about our societies than those proudly displayed grand monuments.

The exhibition Matière terrestre displays these interiors in which Françoise Huguier chose to linger in order to better evoke those who live, wash, cook and sleep there. Photographs from several major series produced over the last thirty years have been selected from her prolific body of work. Fragments of lives in communal apartments in Saint Petersburg sit alongside those of people from the distant Bering Strait and the urban middle classes of Southeast Asia. In these intimate spaces, we encounter a profusion of colours, textures and materials, and many female figures with whom the photographer shared her daily life. 

Just like these interiors, distilling an essence of our ways of inhabiting the world, the exhibition Matière terrestre is conceived as a condensed version of Françoise Huguier’s lucid genius in telling us about the Earth and its current inhabitants, casually, on the corner of a table, in the smallest details of these intimate moments.