Luces Distantes

(2020 – …)

Interlacing creation and resistance, Luces Distances is an alliance developed since 2020 between Marc Lathuillière and Afro-descendant peasant communities of Urabá, an area of armed conflict over land control in northern Colombia, on the border with Panama. They are organized into Humanitarian and Biodiversity Zones, a status making them enclaves forbidden to any arms-bearer. A non-violent strategy to defend their lives, their hyperdiverse jungle and wetlands against deforestation and land grabbing orchestrated by agro-industrialists in collusion with the first narco-paramilitary group of the country.

Deliberately conceived within this constrained framework, the artistic process integrates three vital demands: visibilization of their struggle, protection of their lives, empowerment of their structures. These feed a constant co-invention of new media of environmental resistance associating photographs, films, writings, social networks and performative forms. In accordance with this diversity-based approach, the first series of the project, in 2020, attempted to present the villagers not as isolated and recognizable individuals, but as members of human and non-human collectives, connected with plants of their environment.  

Since 2022, the project has focused on the Biodiversity Zone of La Madre Unión, whose leaders invited Lathuillière to empower their budding environmental association. Renamed the Guardianes Madre Árbol (Guardians of Mother Tree), it is meant to enable them to speak out. The design of a logo, clothing, visibility through social networks and exhibitions (Rencontres d’Arles in 2023) were complemented by the shooting of a co-signed short fiction documentary, Ser Guardianes Madre Árbol, supported by the Cnap and AM Art Films. The alliance also includes the development of international support networks for the Guardianes: launched in 2023, the new project, Sueños (Dreams), is a transatlantic exchange of texts of support written on pillows between Paris-based authors on one side and Guardianes on the other.

Pending the upload of the whole project here – it is still in progress – its summary is presented in this pdf:

Luces Distantes:


MASCARAS

Seven portraits of villagers wearing masks made from plants. Most of them come with texts written with their own hands on pieces of fabric. Signed under aliases, these statements enable them to freely express their relationship with their territorial environment, the necessity and the danger of defending it. On original fabric or in the form of a photographic edition, these texts are associated with the portraits to form diptychs.


CUERPOS Y PLANTAS

Community members are portrayed through photographs of a part of their body and a plant from their biotope which they ask to represent them. Counting from one to three images, these eighteen "environmental portraits" include handwritten texts signed under aliases, in which the villagers express their commitments and fears. Images and statements (the later on original fabric or in the form of a photographic edition) are presented as polyptychs.


VOCES DISTANTES

Eleven videos (approximately 1 mn 40 each) in which the villagers film the artist reading their texts in the landscapes planted with the species they have chosen to represent them in the Cuerpos Y Plantas and Mascaras series. Most of them are still in post-production:

Voz de Gabo
Video, 1 mn 32, 2020

Voz de Agua,
Video, 1 mn 44, 2020

Voz de Patricia
Video, 1 mn 39, 2020


Apariciones

The forty or so night shots in this series were taken in almost complete darkness with a Minox infrared hunting camera. The series addresses the imagination of the communities - the daily fear, a life never far away from death - trying to transform these experiences into tales close to their traditions, and to the Colombian sense of “magic realism”. Overexposing the eyes and the skin as well as the vegetation, the infrared flash makes the facial features of the villagers unrecognizable, and tends to blend them into their environment. The photographs are meant to be printed on glass sheets, displayed on shelves either individually or in friezes whose composition can vary.


Depix

Four composite portraits made by superimposing several photographed faces, thus creating a new fictitious face. The composition is made in digital post-production, by assembling Photoshop layers. To generate these layers, the first step was to photograph a tarpaulin with a pixelated camouflage pattern - the type used by paramilitary groups. Each of the five pixelated colours of the camouflage was then isolated to create a corresponding layer for each person's face. Thus, the part of a woman's portrait corresponding to the khaki pixels is superimposed on the part of another woman's portrait corresponding to the brown pixels, and so on for the other colours. Through this protocol, Depix evokes the collective nature of the villagers’ resistance, as well as a displacement of the struggle onto the territory of digital networks.

Related Documents


ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS

2021
Conversation with Julien Petit, curator at MAMU (Bogota) “Lumières distantes”
BoumBang.com

2020
Léon Mychkine
“Les recherches d’une éthique indiciaire de la photographie chez Marc Lathuillière”
Art-icle.fr

2021
Fares Chalabi Des cristaux et des masques – sur la photographie cristalline et fabulatoire de Marc Lathuillière”
TK-21.com

PUBLICATIONS AND VIDEOS

2023
Grow Up, exhibition catalogue, Kehrer Verlag / MRO Foundation

2020
Sorbonne ArtGallery – interview on Crecer, Resistir exhibition by Marie Normand, 16 November 2020

PRESS

2023
Art Press – « Arles, les Rencontres de la photographie », Marc Donnadieu, 09.2023

Impact Art News – « Expositions en France : un été phyto-sensible« , Pauline Lisowski and Aloïs Loizeau, 07.2023

Lacritique.org : « Rencontres d’Arles : un état de conscience en 2023 », David Gauthier, 15.07.2023

2020
RFI –
Journal des Amériques,
interview about Crecer, Resistir exhibition by Marie Normand (french).

Exhibition


National Museum

(2004 – 2019)

“No, it is not the ‘literature of the absurd’ that first comes to mind when I think of Marc Lathuillière’s photographs; but rather those strange science-fiction short stories where the characters, captured in a time warp, are forced to repeat indefinitely the same gestures (…). These short stories anyhow take place in beautiful weather, beneath a spotless and permanently blue sky. Storms and clouds make instantly for drama; but tragedy, like absolute happiness, requires a constant azure”.

Michel Houellebecq, foreword to Musée National, La Martinière editions, 216 p., 2014

A critical work on national identity, Musée national is a corpus of around 1000 contextual portraits of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, each wearing an identical mask, that Marc Lathuillière has been developing for the last 15 years.

Defacing and freezing the subjects, the mask casts daily surroundings in an estranging light, revealing the stereotypes upon which they build their lives: clothing, furniture, architecture, landscape, professional or daily rituals… Showing France as a museum, the series exposes a country whose people, fearful of the future, increasingly define themselves in terms of heritage and memory. It also explores the construction of identities, both individual and collective.

National Museum met with a significant critical and public success since the 2014 Month of Photography in Paris, where Marc Lathuillière organized a double exhibition with Michel Houellebecq, both in galleries and Paris train stations. The writer wrote the foreword of Musée national, a catalogue of the first ten years of the series published by Editions de La Martinière. The Neuflize Vie Foundation as well as the Musée Français de la Photographie and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) have acquired prints from this wide inventory, the later in the prospect of French Landscapes, the retrospective on landscape photography it hosted in 2017. It followed two large solo shows, one with anthropologist Marc Augé at La Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille, the other at the Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers) one of France’s foremost art centers, for the Lyon Biennale, coupled with a long term exhibition at Galeries Lafayette Clermont-Ferrand. The series has also been exhibited in group shows at Photoszene Festival in Cologne, Paris Photo, Photo London, the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS), Kolga Tbilisi Photo in Georgia.

Related Documents


INTERVIEWS

2017
Conversation, Pascal Beausse – Marc Augé
On The Anthropologist and the Photographer
La Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille,
English and French

2015
MOUVEMENT – Conversation, Michel Poivert – Michel Houellebecq – Marc Lathuillière
“Hôtel France”
Mouvement, 2015

2014
Conversation, Frédéric Bouglé – Marc Lathuillière
“Le visage d’un être de conjecture”
Musée national, La Martinière

PRESS

2020
LE POINT – Paris, 1st October, 2020
La France avec un masque, Michel Houellebecq and Christophe Ono-dit-Biot

2020
NEUE ZURCHER ZEITUNG – Zurich,
Michel Houellebecq ist ein ziemlich ungefährlicher Zeitgenosse, Claudia Mäder

2020
CORRIERE DELLA SERA
– Milan, 18 October 2020
Le Maschere Dei Francesi, Michel Houellebecq and Stefano Montefiori

2018
FRANCE INTERParis, 21 October, 2018
Marc Lathuillière ou l’art du masquage, interview by Brigitte Patient

2014
BEAUX ARTS – Paris, October 2014
La France vue par Houellebecq et Lathuillière

2014
LCI – Paris, 25 novembre 2014
5-7h interview of Marc Lathuillière by Michel Field

2014
TELERAMA SORTIR –
Le photographe Marc Lathuillière tombe le masque
by Hugo Saadi

PUBLICATIONS

2017 
Paysages français – une aventure photographique, catalogue, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) editions

2014
Musée National, foreword by Michel Houellebecq. La Martinière editions

Musée National
by Marc Lathuillière
2014

2014
Month of Photography in Paris, catalogue, Actes Sud editions

Exhibitions


Fractal Spaces

(2013 – 2019)

Fractal Spaces is a body of photographs of peri-urban landscapes mounted on mirrors, exploring our changing relationship to nature and industry in the capitalocene era. Most of the images were taken at the end of the winter of 2016 in the Rhône Valley, the most industrialised region in France, during a residency at Moly Sabata, Albert Gleizes Foundation, at the invitation of Le Creux de l’enfer contemporary art center. The viewpoints – through budding tree branches – suggest that these images talk less about ruin than about mutation.

The Fractal Spaces landscapes mimic the established codes of topographic photography in order to subvert them: industrial parks, suburban housing and commercial developments are captured from a distance, under a neutral grey sky and without human figures. These contemporary stereotypes are reinterpreted through two forms of superposition.

The first one, the curtain of trees in front of the built-up background, reverses the perspective: it is not, as in the usual topographic photography, an altered nature that is being observed by man, but rather nature that is watching over threatened industrial spaces. A non-anthropocentric point of view questioning deindustrialization, and landscape mutations generated by a network economy in which we relate to the world through tree-like fractal structures.

At the post-production phase, a second effect is introduced by the mounting of transparent prints on mirror. The reflection of the vegetation and architecture in the mirror’s shading, on different planes, invites a reading that is more specular than documentary. The pieces are activated by the viewer, who is invited to situate himself in relation to the images and the reality they reflect. It is thus an attempt to blur the divide between nature and culture, viewer and landscape, subject and object.


Fractal Table

(2018 - ... )

«  On this industrial drafting table, what is unfolding as a rhizome is indeed the territory of the work, constantly moving between words and images. »

Héloïse Conesa, conversation for The Photocaptionist, August 2019

Centrepiece of the Fractal Factory exhibition at Galerie Binome (2018), Fractal Table #01 was conceived as a prototype: an old industrial drawing table discarded by a mirror maker on which a table top covered with a steel sheet was adapted. As in photo labs, prints and transparencies can therefore be held by magnets, superimposed on mirrors. Evolutive - five successive versions were exhibited - and potentially mobile, the piece seeks to blur the boundaries between studio, exhibition furniture and installation.

Although it was created in connection with the Fractal Spaces series, it is open to the reinterpretation of other bodies of work - images, texts, archives - relating to the societal and environmental upheavals brought about by globalisation. The transformation of this obsolete furniture from the industrial era into a sculptural piece calls up different references: the lecterns of pre-digital libraries as well as the control consoles of factory lines or the multiple windows of computer screens. On the table space, images and texts are linked, refracted by the mirrors, and contextualised by the reflections of the exhibition space and of the moving visitors.

Fractal Spaces

(2013 - 2019)

Fractal Spaces is a body of photographs of peri-urban landscapes mounted on mirrors, exploring our changing relationship to nature and industry in the capitalocene era. Most of the images were taken at the end of the winter of 2016 in the Rhône Valley, the most industrialised region in France, during a residency at Moly Sabata, Albert Gleizes Foundation, at the invitation of Le Creux de l'enfer contemporary art center. The viewpoints - through budding tree branches - suggest that these images talk less about ruin than about mutation.

The Fractal Spaces landscapes mimic the established codes of topographic photography in order to subvert them: industrial parks, suburban housing and commercial developments are captured from a distance, under a neutral grey sky and without human figures. These contemporary stereotypes are reinterpreted through two forms of superposition.

The first one, the curtain of trees in front of the built-up background, reverses the perspective: it is not, as in the usual topographic photography, an altered nature that is being observed by man, but rather nature that is watching over threatened industrial spaces. A non-anthropocentric point of view questioning deindustrialization, and landscape mutations generated by a network economy in which we relate to the world through tree-like fractal structures.

At the post-production phase, a second effect is introduced by the mounting of transparent prints on mirror. The reflection of the vegetation and architecture in the mirror's shading, on different planes, invites a reading that is more specular than documentary. The pieces are activated by the viewer, who is invited to situate himself in relation to the images and the reality they reflect. It is thus an attempt to blur the divide between nature and culture, viewer and landscape, subject and object.


Related Documents


ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS

2022
Jean-Charles Vergne, text for Le promontoire du songe, exhibition catalogue, FRAC Auvergne

2021
Fares Chalabi Des cristaux et des masques – sur la photographie cristalline et fabulatoire de Marc Lathuillière”
TK-21.com

2019
Text-image portfolio and conversation with Héloïse Conesa, curator at the BnF
"Refracting"
The Photocaptionist

PUBLICATIONS

2022
Le promontoire du songe, catalogue, FRAC Auvergne

2020
Quelque chose noir, catalogue, Galerie Gradiva

Exhibitions


Related Documents


ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS

2022
Jean-Charles Vergne, text for Le promontoire du songe, exhibition catalogue, FRAC Auvergne

2021
Fares Chalabi Des cristaux et des masques – sur la photographie cristalline et fabulatoire de Marc Lathuillière”
TK-21.com

2019
Text-image portfolio and conversation with Héloïse Conesa, curator at the BnF
“Refracting”
The Photocaptionist

PUBLICATIONS

2022
Le promontoire du songe, catalogue, FRAC Auvergne

2020
Quelque chose noir, catalogue, Galerie Gradiva

Exhibitions