The Centre Claude Cahun presents Une Odyssée en terre agricole by Damien Mousseau until October 4th, 2025.
Since 2018, Damien Mousseau has been photographing the agricultural landscape to document how the soil is cultivated. His exhibition “An Odyssey in Farmland” examines the impact of machines on the land and the changes they bring to our landscapes..
You know these landscapes; you’ve seen them from your car or train window. They are large, uniform flat areas, vast expanses of more or less defined crops, whose flatness and movement are, for fleeting moments, broken by the expected roar of a tractor or those large horizontal ramps that stretch across kilometers of plantations. Banal images of a certain agricultural France, that of large farms, which could raise questions if we stop for a moment. These fields resemble more the facades of industries, which Lewis Baltz photographed in 1975, wondering what was being produced there, than the joyful harvests filmed by Jacques Tati in Jour de fête. Of course, agriculture has changed since 1949; we have to feed the world, but what do we eat? Damien Mousseau’s work starts with this question.
“I have always had a love for agriculture and its landscape. Observing it, understanding it like a scientist, scrutinizing it while walking or gazing at it from a car window. I discovered it as a child, through my family life and the scenery of my native environment. However, today, this agricultural world has become fictitious in the eyes of the man, the consumer and the French citizen that I am. I have become ignorant. I am ignorant of how my food is manufactured, produced and processed. I am ignorant of how animals are raised. Of how fields and soils are exploited. It has become difficult to be in direct contact with those who work to feed us.”
What do we see of this agricultural world today? Walking through these countrysides has become as opaque as daring to walk in an industrial zone bordering our cities. The land disappears, the action too, all that remains are the large machines that strike the space to better turn it over and exhaust it. It is this constant upheaval that Damien seeks to capture in a moving photograph. Damien roams these landscapes that elude him, capturing traces and explosions from the machines at work. Following the rhythm of this industrial plowing and questioning what remains for us. Getting close enough to ask the question: what are we looking at? Damien’s work offers a suspension of the present moment. We witness, in sequences, the programmed exhaustion of this nourishing earth, haikus of agricultural machinery. There also remains, in scattered spasms, the wonder of the bucolic, and these few cows resting in the shade of a tree leave their thousand other counterparts out of frame. The mundane has no place in this time, because each image goes a little further into this matter, they grab hold of it, is it still earth? And with this very question, the odyssey begins.
text written by the Centre Claude Cahun
Damien Mousseau : Une Odyssée en terre agricole
Until October 4, 2025
Centre Claude Cahun (association Confluence photographique)
45 rue de Richebourg
44000, Nantes
www.centreclaudecahun.fr
