As part of its efforts to promote emerging talent and following its membership in the European platform FUTURES, the Centre Photographique launched FRUTESCENS in 2022, a program designed to support emerging French photographers.
Discover the four artists selected for the 2026 edition, who are joining FUTURES and, as such, will benefit from the European network provided by the platform.
Following the selection process, four artists were chosen for the uniqueness of their research and work: Gaëlle Delort (1988), Lívia Melzi (1985), Emma Tholot (1994) and Valentin Valette (1994). Whilst each artist’s approach is distinct, they share an interest in the document and the photographic image as a site of memory, or even belief.
In the case of Gaëlle Delort, it is the landscape of the Causses, where she lives, that is revealed through a long-term exploration using a view camera. Combining cave exploration with her photographic practice, she captures the region’s geomorphology in striking underground landscapes. Venturing several leagues beneath the earth we tread upon, she methodically probes and records the reverse side of the world’s surface, where the earth’s archives lie.
It is the memory of human beings and their artefacts that Lívia Melzi seeks to bring to the fore. Drawing on the archives of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, destroyed by fire in 2018, she too is pursuing a long and extensive project of collecting from the reserves of ethnographic museums. Drawing on these traces of the past, the Franco-Brazilian artist questions the future of their photographic collections.
As sediments of belief, the photographic image takes on, in Emma Tholot’s work, a range of media borrowed from the realm of Mediterranean folk tradition. Her installations blend theatrical elements from religion, carnival and the circus. Migrating onto fabric, adorned with ribbons, bells, wax ex-votos, cushions and satin, the photographic image becomes the crucible of a collective memory with baroque overtones.
Finally, the photographic work as presented by Valentin Valette is informed by his training in visual anthropology. The Franco-Algerian artist undertakes photographic projects in the Gulf states and is particularly interested in contemporary Oman. In a sweeping panorama combining documents, photographs and sound, he portrays migrant builders and entrepreneurs. Standing alone in vast desert landscapes, we discover structures of which we cannot say whether they come from a distant past or a distant future.
