Anaïs Boileau’s first works freely associated Mediterranean architectures with frank geometries and portraits of women receiving the sun. Between the two, a strange resonance could be heard, that created by the reverberation of the sun on the photographed surfaces: skin, facades, glasses and other tanning accessories… The flatness of the abandoned bodies echoed that of the colored walls. The photograph, although well and truly figurative, was filled with the silence of forms, the play of their surfaces, their colors. This Plein Soleil, which made her known, is in retrospect a preamble to the experiments recently carried out by the photographer. Still in the South of France, she now composes in her garden. The means are simple: a few sheets of paper, gathered for the palette of specific textures and colors they deploy, here and there accessories and garden materials and then, the effect of the sun on their surfaces. The artist and the sun compose together and enjoy the play of shadows, and in places, the paint and its transparency make their appearance and add to the confusion of the image.

From the reality of the garden, of the farmyard, however present, this small open-air studio manages to gradually abstract itself to take us with it, in a plastic ecstasy, similar to the dizziness that the sun provides.

Anaïs Boileau was born in 1992 in Nîmes. She is a photographic artist who works by exploring Mediterranean cultures as a constant source of inspiration in her projects. She graduated from the art school of Lausanne, ECAL. She lives in the south of France where she alternates between photographic commissions and her artistic projects. Her work is presented in various group exhibitions and selected in several international festivals. In September 2017, she joins a master year at Central Saint Martins School in London in photography. Since her first collaboration for M le magazine du Monde in 2015, she works regularly for the French and international press. Her work can be found in magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, M le magazine du Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Time or Vanity Fair.

On the banks of the Rio Tinto in Spain or on the outskirts of the old arsenic mine in Salsigne, Coline Jourdan undertakes an archaeology of toxicity. If toxicity is generally not perceived, what could photography do at the place of its figuration? How could she claim to represent it? To make an image of it, Coline Jourdan combines documentary investigation and plastic experimentation. She gathers documents and testimonies, recently, on the occasion of Raising the Dust, a series dedicated to the former gold and arsenic mine of Salsigne, she enlists the collaboration of scientists, from whom she records research processes and testimonies, consults the archives of the department, digs into the iconographies of the past glory of the site. In the image of these collections of information, her photography becomes a collection of traces. One discovers here a collection of small stones, there some plant specimens, and suddenly, on what one recognizes as a slag heap, the emergence of points of incandescence on the surface of the image. Her photography sometimes literally becomes a means of taking samples of the terrain explored: for example, she occasionally dips her films in the water of the nearby river. What the territory contains is then symbolically revealed in the thickness of the photographic material, until it exudes.

Coline Jourdan, born in 1993, lives and works in Rouen, Normandy. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Dijon in 2017. Her work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions (Musée Nicéphore Niepce as part of the Ateliers Vortex Photographic Print Prize in 2019; Festival de La Gacilly, Baden, Austria, 2021; Artefacts, (Residency 1+2), Chapelle des Cordeliers, Toulouse, 2020; Les noirceurs du fleuve rouge, Galerie Full B1, Rouen, 2019). In 2021, she received the Support for Contemporary Documentary Photography from the CNAP, as well as individual support for creation from the Normandy Region. The same year, she is the laureate of the 50CC Air de Normandie artist grant.

It is a phenomenological photography that Nolwenn Brod constructs, one that places at the heart of the creative process, the experience of the encounter. It all began in Ireland in the footsteps of her father (Va-t’en me perdre où tu voudras, 2015 – Poursuite Editions) and then in cities with an industrial or port history, affected by the war: Lodz, Warsaw, Gdansk in Poland, Beirut in Lebanon and more recently Brest in Brittany. It is often a question of the representation of an inner struggle, of a duel, of the forms created by the forces in conflict.  Each portrait, each individual case, is political; the bodies make society. The meticulous observation of the significant gestures of daily life, the micro-sensation, the micro-event, the volatility of the moment, of the presence of beings, nourish her work. 

With, on, under, through, would be as many conjunctions to apprehend the environment and the inhabitants in and with which she is brought to work. The projects are nourished by literary companionship: the structuralism of Witold Gombrowicz’s street accompanies her in Poland during the realization of Time of immaturity (2018 – in progress); in Creuse, on the lines of Gilles Deleuze, she composes the photographs of La Ritournelle (2015-16); more recently, Jean-Luc Nancy, Charles S. Peirce or Tanguy Viel inspire Les Hautes solitudes in Brest (2021 – in progress).

Nolwenn Brod is a French artist based in Paris. She studied humanities and social sciences, and trained in photography in London and at the Gobelins school in Paris. She is a member of Agence Vu and represented by the eponymous gallery in Paris since 2016.

She develops her projects most often in the context of creative residencies in France and Europe where she mixes photography and video; and responds to commissions for the press and institutions. Her works are regularly exhibited in France and Europe and are part of the collections of the Bnf, the Cnap, the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, the Musée de Bretagne, the Villa Noailles, the Agnès b. collection, the Neuflize OBC Foundation, art libraries and private collections. Her first book was published by Poursuite in 2015, the second is in preparation.

Pauline Hisbacq’s work, in photography or through the manipulation of archival images (collages, montages), evokes in a poetic way the questions of youth, desire, rites of passage and resistance. She searches for feelings in forms and figures. She explores today what links the intimate and the political, the myth and the contemporary. 

The project Songs for women and birds is a set of collages made from archival images of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981-2000). There, ordinary women peacefully fought, solo, against the installation of nuclear missiles by the United States, right here in England, which contributed to the terror of the Cold War. They sang in resistance to the police, and more generally to the world of domination, for the preservation of future generations, the hope of peace, the protection of humanity, and respect for nature.

The collages focus on the way women inscribe their bodies in a gesture of resistance that is the antithesis of current demonstrations. The first challenge to communicate their revolt was to be always peaceful, even in the face of police repression. It was thus necessary to weld the bodies, in the tenderness, to make face with the domination which they denounced and which attacked them. Scissor cuts are made on archival images of the protest, to show the specific body language of the women of Greenham. 

Pauline Hisbacq was born in 1980 in Toulouse, France and lives and works in Paris. After a master’s degree in philosophy, she entered the ENSP of Arles from which she graduated in 2011. She continued the same year with a post-graduate degree at the ICP in New York. Since then, her work has been presented at the Rencontres de la Jeune photographie Internationale de Niort (2014), at the Ecureuil Foundation for Contemporary Art in Toulouse (2019), at the Image Satellite in Nice (2018), at the friche belle de Mai in Marseille (2017), at the Paris Saint Germain Photo Festival (2017), at the Bal (2019), at the Rouen Normandie Photographic Center (2021).  She published Natalya at 7 Editions (2016), Le feu at September books (2017), Amour adolescente (chants d’amour) at Rayon Vert edition (2019), Cadavre Exquis, fanzine co-edited by Le Bal Books and September Books (2021), Songs for women and birds at September books (2021). In 2017, she was awarded the CNAP’s Soutien à la photographie documentaire contemporaine grant for the project La fête et les cendres. In 2021, she received the Aide Individuelle à la Création from the Drac Ile de France for the project Rimorso. She is also the winner of the national commission Les Regards du Grand Paris initiated by the CNAP and the Ateliers Médicis, with the project Pastorale. She is currently a photographer at the Rodin Museum and editor at Septembre Books.