9th edition of the French Guyana Rencontres Photographiques

The only photography biennial in France’s overseas departments, the Rencontres Photographiques of Guyane (Guyane Photography Encounters) has pursued its unwavering ambition since 2012: to give art photography the place it deserves at the heart of Guyana’s cultural landscape, whether by highlighting emerging artists from the region or by showcasing internationally renowned creators.

An event focused on innovation, the biennial deploys new exhibition formats with each edition and creates spaces for dialogue around the image and photographic practice.

“Florestania, what if we succeed?”

Since the 19th century, photography has amazed us by revealing the invisible details of the world. From the fragmented gallop of the horse in Muybridge’s images (1887) to Earth from the Moon (1968), certain photographs have revolutionized our perception of ourselves and our place in the universe. Born in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, photography developed alongside the scientific, social, and technological transformations that shaped modernity. Very quickly, the image also became a tool of capture, subject to an extractive and quantitative logic a faithful mirror of the dynamics of capitalist domination.

In contrast to this hegemonic history of the image, the 9th edition of the Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane (Guyane Photography Encounters) has chosen to explore the notion of florestania, a concept that emerged in the late 1990s within Amazonian socio-environmental movements. A fusion of the words floresta (forest) and cidadania (citizenship), florestania calls for a reconsideration of the forest not as a mere geographical space, but as a political subject in its own right. It proposes a citizenship founded not on law, but on the relationship with living beings, ancestors, spirits, and the environment. A way of inhabiting the world in interdependence.

As journalist and theorist of the concept Antônio Alves Leitão Neto reminds us, florestania carries a profoundly political and ecological vision. It invites us to think about nature outside of extractive frameworks and to consider our existence according to narratives other than those imposed by globalized capitalism. It questions our economic choices, our cultural values, and our daily practices. And above all, it rekindles a vital force: a way of being in the world rooted in care, memory, diversity, and listening.

This reflection resonates particularly strongly in French Guiana, a territory largely covered by the Amazon rainforest, with its exceptional biodiversity, and marked by a mosaic of cultures stemming from more than 80 different origins. In this context, the image—still or moving—becomes a sensitive tool for sharing knowledge, transmitting memories, and collectively shaping possible futures.

The artists and curators of this edition, hailing from various parts of the world, offer diverse visual narratives, nourished by their roots, cultures, and visions. Their works invite us to break free from dominant representations: rational, urban, individualistic, and productivist. They trace alternative paths, founded on empathy, connection, coexistence, and spirituality.

In this context, Florestania is not a distant utopia. It is a concrete gesture, a call to listen and transform. It recognizes neither center nor periphery, but a constellation of interconnected worlds. As Ailton Krenak and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro suggest, are we a homogeneous humanity, or an irreducible plurality of human and non-human existences, all interconnected? Peoples, trees, rivers, the invisible: we are all linked.

Ioana Mello Associate Curator of the MAZ