Adrien Pontet & Tao Douay
Exîle
To 25 May
Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale 2024
Special edition – 30 years on?
Exîle ‘s starting point is a simple ecological observation: silver mining reserves will soon be exhausted. At the current rate of extraction, there would be around twenty years of exploitation left, so it seems clear to us that silver photography is living its last moments. Our images are the fruit of work carried out in the early winter of 2023 on a small island off the coast of Brittany. All the negatives have been revealed with plants collected on the island, and the prints presented at the exhibition will also be revealed but fixed to the plants. Very attached to the medium of silver-based photography, we hope to continue experimenting with it, freeing ourselves as far as possible from traditional chemistry and using out-of-date film and paper, destined to be thrown away. However, this type of fixing is not sustainable. Starting from an ecological and poetic gesture, we propose a work that reconnects with the very essence of photography: accident, imperfection and impermanence. Our images are a springboard for reflection on the specificity of our times, on silver photography itself, and on the common fantasy of insularity and isolation at a time when the world as we know it is collapsing. The technical supports and the narratives we have constructed function as communicating vessels: the ephemeral and uncertain nature of our images echoes the finitude of silver photography and that of the world it captures.
Practical information
Biography
After a master’s degree in philosophy and another in journalism, Adrien Pontet worked for several years as a freelancer in the cultural press. It was during these years of critical work on the fine arts that he honed his eye for contemporary photography and its world. Just before the Covid 19 pandemic, he had the opportunity to leave Paris and settle on a private island in Brittany, where he was hired as caretaker/intendant. He has been living there for the past four years, and in addition to his general stewardship and heritage preservation duties, he is working on writing short stories and experimenting with silver photography and its alternative modes of development.
Biography
Tao Douay was born near Toulouse, and has lived ever since, in one of those charming old presbyteries, in a little village perched in the Comminges hills called Montaut. Montaut has the peculiarity of being so sparsely populated that the village consists of a church, a presbytery, a vague square and three or four houses… Another peculiarity is that the cemetery is still attached to the church, and is also part of the heart of the village. As a child, Tao was able to play, dream and imagine among the tombs and cypress trees.
In the midst of this isolated childhood, a seminal interlude transformed him forever. His family left Montaut for a few years, moving to a small Chilean town on the edge of the desert. It was a defining period that ended with a forced return to France, a feeling of irrepressible uprootedness.