Festival Art Souterrain

In her series Édens, Céline Lecomte utilizes photography to explore how nature is represented in contemporary inhabited spaces. By incorporating artificial elements such as plastic plants and animals, pruned trees, and synthetic grass, she underscores humanity’s attempts to reconnect with a natural world that their own actions have primarily diminished. This paradoxical relationship with living organisms becomes even more pronounced in light of today’s biodiversity crisis.

The staged scenes, created with the assistance of individuals she encounters on location, enhance the sense of strangeness and disconnection from reality. The concept of pretending—typically associated with childhood—is reintroduced into adulthood. Additionally, the circular layout of the exhibition space evokes various children’s games, such as merry-go-rounds or carousels, whose movements are both circular and repetitive. This spatial design emphasizes the naïveté and irony already evident in her work, where the quest for a lost paradise transforms into a somewhat ridiculous game against the backdrop of an artificial nature.

Lecomte, originally from Reims, France, currently resides in Charleville-Mézières. She holds a Master’s degree in Land Planning and the Environment from the Université de Franche-Comté (France, 2003) and a DESS in Sustainable Development from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (2006). Driven by a desire to document the areas she works in, she examines the intricate relationship between humans and nature and the complexities of the issues at hand. Her work has been exhibited in France, notably in Arles by Agence VU’ in 2023, at Nuit Blanche in Charleville-Mézières in 2016, and at the Musée de l’Ardenne in 2017. From 2015 to 2021, she curated the Urbi & Orbi festival and co-authored the books Paysages du vent (2017) and Yeu, nature et esprit d’une île (2016), published by Noires Terres. In 2023, she received the VU’ Education Prize for her project Avril ou les forêts Potemkine.