Arles – 2025 Discovery Prize Louis Roederer Foundation : L’assemblée de ceux qui doutent

The exhibition is composed of individuals who distrust official history and share their dissatisfaction with the established order of things. Each uses doubt to explore the conflicts of their present. And, deep down, they ask themselves: how can we reestablish a bond of trust with reality?

In a story where the fear of catastrophe is dispelled by dark humor, Zuzana Pustaiová questions the veracity of information transmitted by mass media in Slovakia. In Julie Joubert’s social portrait of the Foreign Legion, hyper-masculinity and fraternity are two traits that characterize a group of young people seeking French citizenship. Denis Serrano addresses machismo as a double-edged sword in Mexico. The broken mental health of adult men is revealed to be an underlying element of gender-based violence in public spaces. Heba Khalifa exhumes her childhood memories to reconnect with her present in the city of Cairo; in a quest to reconcile with her past, she denounces the repression of religion and family against female bodies. Musuk Nolte’s journey, triggered by the consumption of ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon, aims at the possibility of reestablishing a sensitive connection with the body through an indigenous imaginary. Octavio Aguilar asserts the importance of the indigenous Ayuuk culture in the face of globalization and uses his Mixe language to recover the history of his ancestors. Daniel Mebarek reinterprets the work of Bolivia’s itinerant photographers to reflect on the processual nature of photography and the collective dimension of identity. For him, photography is an indispensable social practice for reformulating cultural distribution and consumption, while for the group in general, it represents a tool for moving between different eras to reshape the present. We are currently living in a time marked by the urgent need for new voices in the public sphere, whose strength lies in expressing their singularity in the first person.

César González- Aguirre