Camille-Renée Devid
Born 1974 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Camille-Renée Devid is a visual artist working with photography, collage, and hand-painted interventions. Her work explores identity, memory, and belonging. Through an intuitive, research-based process, her images move between intimacy and abstraction, allowing ambiguity to remain part of the meaning. She published My Other Side with Schilt Publishing in 2014 and has exhibited internationally, including Voies Off Arles, Bruges Photo Festival, and Photo Festival Leiden. Her recent project Discovering My Colors brings personal research into dialogue with broader questions of identity.
Who am I?
When I close my eyes, I feel Dutch.
But I don’t have blue eyes or blond hair Surinamese blood runs through my veins, yet I don’t speak the language.
I know the national anthem of Curaçao by heart, but I was not born there.
So where do I belong? Where do I come from? And what do I feel?
Discovering My Colors began as a question and grew from the realization that identity is never a single story. It exists in layers: family, place, memory, loss, love, migration, and the silences that travel through generations. In this work, the body becomes an archive, a site where history settles into skin, gesture, voice, and emotion.
The work begins with ancestral memory, with the dance of ancient souls. Layered portraits and double exposures allow past and present to exist together. The images follow intuition and feeling, the sense that we carry people we have never met, yet somehow recognize.
These shadows and echoes lead me back to my first ground of belonging: my parents. Polaroids of my mother from the final months of her life hold both warmth and fragility. Portraits of my father speak of devotion and quiet strength. Their love, choices, and everyday presence shaped the way I see and how I stand in the world. They are my foundation, the bedrock upon which all other questions of identity are built.
From this foundation, the journey moves inward.
Self‑portraits and DNA‑inspired abstractions map the invisible. A DNA test revealed multiple origins, which I translated into colour and form. What emerges is an emotional landscape that exists beyond borders, nations, and maps a geography written in the body itself.
This work makes space for complexity. It invites you to pause and ask: Where do you feel at home? What stories live in your body and memory?
Let these questions help you see your own colors. Not to categorize them, but to connect them, and to imagine the bridges we can build between one another..
Camille-Renée Devid
Venue
Ancien collège Mistral
Exhibition produced by the Rencontres d’Arles.
Tirages
Atelier SHL, Arles ; Arjan van der Raadt – Fotovaklaboratorium de Verbeelding, Purmerend
Wallapers, veils and mounting
Atelier SHL, Arles
Framing
Jacco Schipper – A-frames, Wormerveer
Practical Information
Festival dates: July 6 July – October 4, 2026
Opening Week: 6–12 July, 2026
All-exhibitions pass: €42 (reduced: €33)
www.rencontres-arles.com/en
