Elie Monferier’s artistic approach is based on experimental documentary practice, at the crossroads of photography, publishing and installation. He questions the way in which individuals and territories are constructed through layers of narratives, beliefs and memories, often weakened by time, modernity and oblivion.

Elie Monferier presents Journal des Mines, an investigation into the mining memory of the Ariège region, seen as much a mental landscape as a geological one. In a territory threatened by oblivion, Elie Monferier examines the gradual disappearance of the material traces, archives and testimonies through which memory is formed and circulates. By confronting mining sites rendered inaccessible by changing landscapes, weather conditions, altitude and erosion, he probes how the different strata of memory affect what we can or cannot see, and how what remains hidden haunts a photographic approach that is constantly referred back to the notion of loss. Alteration of images and editorial palimpsests thus resonate with the processes of erosion, sedimentation and disappearance at work in the territories explored.