#36 – Lia Giraud & Marie Rebecchi: Algægraphies and the power of plants: for an ecology of images

As part of the 4th season of  “Créateurs Urgence Climat” programme (October 2023 – May 2024)initiated by the Fondation, artist Lia Giraud and author Marie Rebecchi will come together to discuss about the subject “Algægraphies and the power of plants: for an ecology of images”

A new type of “living image” has emerged in Lia Giraud’s artistic practice. Her algae prints are produced by photosensitive living organisms that participate in the formation of the image: “micro-algae, usually used as pollution markers, replace the photographic silver grain to reveal an image that has become alive”. Because if ecology needs images, there are techniques for producing them that can reveal both the vitality of the world and its heterochronies that offer solutions.

Created in 2020 by the Fondation Thalie, this series of conversations between artists, designers and scientists committed to a post-carbon society aims to pass on new thinking and knowledge to inspire a whole new generation of creators, to invent imaginaries of transition, and to design and implement new ways of producing in the light of depleting natural resources. The great ecological challenge of our time.

 

Initially trained as a documentary filmmaker, Lia Giraud is an artist, holds a PhD in visual arts (SACRe/PSL) and teaches photography at the Beaux-Arts in Marseille. For over ten years, her installations have explored the evolution of our conceptions and relationships with living things, in a context marked by science and technology. Combining biological phenomena, technical gestures and imaging systems, her processual works use sensitive and operative dialogue to interrogate our experience of the environment, seeking to propose new ecologies. Committed to creating interdisciplinary research ecosystems at the frontier between science and society, her projects involve researchers in the natural sciences, thinkers, artists and civic communities. Her work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions (Centre Pompidou, Le 104, Le Cube, Le Bel Ordinaire, Festival Images de Vevey, Naturpark Our, Dutch Design Week), broadcasts (Artpress, Tracks, Wired, Vice) and educational interventions with the general public.

Marie Rebecchi is a lecturer in Aesthetics and History of Cinema at Université de Aix-Marseille and a member of LESA. She is the author of Paris 1929. Eisenstein, Bataille, Buñuel (Mimésis, Images médiums, 2018) and co-edited the book Puissances du végétal et cinéma animiste. La vitalité révélée par la technique (Les presses du réel, 2020). In 2020 she co-organised the exhibition Time Machine. Cinematic Temporalities (Parma, 2020) and co-edited its publication (Skira, 2020). In February 2021 she organised the closing marathon of the Hors Pistes Festival (L’écologie des images – Le vivant révélé par la technique) at the Centre Pompidou (Paris). For the year 2020-2021 she has been a visiting researcher at the University of Lausanne (Cinema Section) and is working on the project ‘The kaleidoscope. Optics, Abstraction, Psychedelia”. In 2023 she is a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Film and Media Studies Program (fall 2023).

 

Based on a curatorial proposal by Fondation Thalie, this fourth season hosted at the École des Arts Décoratifs is organised by Chiara Vecchiarelli, coordinator of the programme Creators facing the climate emergency, in co-construction with Patrick Laffont-DeLojo, teacher in stage design at the École des Arts Décoratifs.


In partnership with the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris