Raising the Dust

How to photograph invisible pollution? How to report on toxicity present in the air, soil and rivers that we can’t even perceive? Such is the wager embraced by Coline Jourdan for her Soulever la poussière [Raising the Dust] project. For the past three years, the photographer has been documenting the area around Salsigne, the former gold and arsenic mine, located in the Orbiel Valley in the Aude department. This mine, which flourished in the last century and closed at the beginning of the following one, in 2004, leaving behind waste that is now strewn and concealed across the landscape.

 

To better detect the clues to this complex reality and catastrophe foretold, the artist deploys various approaches to the territory, borrowing from different registers (documentary, experimental and scientific photography, archives...). She photographs the gestures and tools of the scientists she accompanies on sampling trips. Against a black background, she captures arsenic rocks that look ready to join the collections of a natural history museum. She develops certain images with water from neighboring rivers, as if better to reveal these invisible after-effects. For the Discovery Award, the project is expanded with a new segment comprising portraits, still lives and landscapes. The artist becomes the custodian of numerous accounts of those who have had to reconsider their way of inhabiting the territory, and for whom the garden and, more broadly, the outside world, have unwittingly become a threat.

 

Born 1993 in Lyon, France.

Lives and works in Plomeur, France.

 

Coline Jourdan is a graduate of the Dijon School of Arts. Her projects question the presence of toxic substances in our environments. In 2018, she was awarded the Prix Impression Photographique by Ateliers Vortex. In 2019, she won the Impulsion Grant from the City of Rouen. In 2020, she won the Nouvelles écritures de la photographie environnementale [New Approaches to Environmental Photography] Prize at the La Gacilly Photo Festival and was selected for the 1+2 Residency, where she began the Soulever la poussière [Raising the dust] series, for which she received support for contemporary documentary photography from Cnap in 2021. In 2022, she won the 50cc Air de Normandie Grant. In 2023, her work was exhibited at Point du Jour, BnF and C/O Berlin.

 

Born in 1978 in Paris, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

 

Her research deals with photography, and more specifically with the medium as the starting point of process-based approaches. She also carried out a research on Vito Acconci in the context of her work on Conceptual Art. She ran the art center Micro Onde and was associate curator at La Comédie de Caen. She teaches in art school, and she has been a contributor for many magazines. She curated the exhibitions Photography to the test of Abstraction (Micro Onde, Frac Normandie Rouen, Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, 2020-2021), Located Images (Micro Onde, 2019), Apparatus: Aurélie Pétrel, Marina Gadonneix (Comédie de Caen, 2015), The Appearance of Images (Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, 2013), Silêncio! (Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, 2008).