Photography & Science Award
Julien Lombardi / Richard Pak
To 21 February
Prix Photographie & Sciences
2 exhibitions in 1!
This winter, La Villa Pérochon is showcasing 2 winners of the Prix Photographie & Sciences. Julien Lombardi won the4th edition in 2024. Between ecology, cosmology and technology, Planeta offers a counter-narrative to the conquest of space in Mexico’s Sonora desert. It questions our representations of space and the myths associated with it. Richard Pak is the first winner in 2021. His photography takes us to the island of Nauru in Micronesia for an ecological and social tale where delusions of grandeur and greed have ravaged an island paradise.
Vernissage Friday October 10 at 6.30pm.
Talk “Reinventing our imaginations through photography and science” Saturday October 11 at 3pm with Julien Lombardi and Richard Pak, moderated by Andreina De Bei, deputy editor and head of the photo department at Sciences et Avenir – la Recherche magazine.
These events are part of the Fête de la Science.
Practical info
Julien Lombardi
Planeta
The Planeta project takes as its starting point the Apollo missions simulated in Mexico’s Sonora desert in the 60s and 70s, and builds a counter-narrative to the conquest of space. With the help of Mexican astrophysicists, biologists, geologists and anthropologists, Julien Lombardi extends this simulation by considering the Earth as an analogous planet. This practice is familiar to exobiologists and planetologists, who work through cognitive and emotional “resonance” to abolish distances and link scientific knowledge with sensitive experience. They seek to produce harmonies between foreign bodies that, for an instant, vibrate on the same frequencies. Inspired by this technique, his photographic practice explores protocols associated with scientific research in the field of space in Mexico: documentation of landscapes, geological sampling, bacteriological evidence, signal research, nanosatellite manufacturing…
Planeta is the winning project of the4th edition of the Prix Photographie & Sciences 2024.
Biography
Julien Lombardi approaches photography in all its forms, whether he is the author or not. His relationship with this medium is reinvented in each of his projects, exploring our environments, our identities and our memories. He draws freely on his training in anthropology and the investigative tools it offers to conduct surveys whose aims are more sensitive than scientific. His approach is akin to that of a researcher, gathering information on social issues such as tourism, heritage or the construction of a young republic, then diverting it by offering a reflection on the image.his photographic works are neither testimonies nor proofs, but rather open fictions that question the past, the present and possible futures.
Richard Pak
Shipwrecked Island ( Islands of Desire cycle)
In less than twenty years, Nauru in Oceania has gone from being the richest country in the world to one of the poorest. Its story could be a literary fiction, where delusions of grandeur and greed have transformed a paradise island into an ecological, economic and social meltdown.
In the last century, a geologist discovered phosphate by chance. Mining then began, with successive foreign powers impoverishing the soil to enrich their own. At independence in 1968, the hundreds of millions of dollars generated by the mining industry made the new state the richest in the world, which was generously redistributed to its population. At the same time, Nauru invested its fortune in real estate and financial speculation. For two euphoric decades, the small band of fishermen adopted the Western way of life, hyper-consuming and spending lavishly. But the day of reckoning arrived in the mid-90s, when the phosphate mines ran out, and with them the island’s almost exclusive revenues. Between delusions of grandeur, corruption and the inexperience of decision-makers, real estate investments turned out to be disastrous and were sold off at a loss. An economic and ecological disaster, the country is sinking and becoming one of the poorest on the planet, while the dense tropical forest that once covered the island has given way to an uninhabitable desert.
This project was supported by Cnap, La Fondation des Artistes and the “Photography & Science Prize” initiated in 2021 by the 1+2 Residency (Toulouse).
Biography
Multidisciplinary author born in France. Lives and works in Paris.
“Organized into series or episodes, Richard Pak’s work is built empirically, that is, without dogma or program, and without systematism either. However, as with any artist, the body of work is structured around major notions and appropriate formal research. In this way, Richard Pak has more or less intuitively established his own “style”. No effects, just body-to-body relationships, the oblivion of one’s presence to the revelation of the other’s existence. It’s the very idea of photography that’s being worked on, with no question of a stylistic coherence, and even less of an invariant process as an aesthetic guarantee. Whether the approach is experimental and plastic, classical and documentary, sociological and fictional, Richard Pak asserts his freedom to write. For what is at play is subterranean, at the very heart of his representation of the world: oceanic feeling, late modernity, the power of affect, embodiment through images. The need to see life in order to exist. Michel Poivert, photography historian.
Richard Pak has published three monographs with Atelier EXB, journal and Filigranes. He exhibits regularly in France and abroad, and his photographs are included in public and private collections including those of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Neuflize OBC Collection and numerous Artothèques.
He is represented in Italy by Galerie Spot (Naples).
The Photography & Science Prize
La Villa Pérochon – CACP, the French Ministry of Culture, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and ADAGP are committed to supporting contemporary photographic creation by creating the Prix Photographie & Sciences, with media partners Fisheye and Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche.
This annual prize is open to all professional photographers on the French scene (French creators or artists working and/or residing in France, whatever their nationality) developing an auteur photography. An endowment of 6,000 euros supports the winning photographer in finalizing a photographic series in progress, combining photography (in all its forms) and the sciences (all disciplines), in France and/or abroad.
Previously organized by the Artist Residency 1+2 in Toulouse, the Prix Photographie & Sciences is now organized by La Villa Pérochon, a contemporary art photography center of national interest in Niort.