© Jean-Michel NIRON
Landscape is a fiction
La Gacilly Photo Festival commits in artistic and cultural education projects. These projects allow encounter during a scholar year between the association, a photographer and a school around a collective artistic project.
During the year 2021-2022, La Gacilly Photo Festival associated with the Cité Scolaire Beaumont of Redon and the plastician photographer Maël Le Golvan. The project "Landscape is a fiction" associated collectively three classes of differents grades :
· 27 6th grade students
· 34 Commercial Advanced Technicien's Certificat students
· 11 Professional Qualification in Restauration students
After a first key moment in autumn at La Gacilly Photo Festival, this photograpic creation workshop lasted all along the school year allowing a contact with the artist Maël Le Golvan and a creative process between the different classes. Basing on the photographic writing, each class worked on the elaboration of a fiction based on a landscape inhabited by a fictive civilisation.
The project was build with the idea of working on the landscape in a ecological and narrative way. It was a way to give body and consistance to the story the students imagined. They made objects, artefacts that they staged in a anthropologic fiction through scenes from everyday life, games or rites on the landscape.
© Jean-Michel Niron
To explore the specificities of the photographic point of view, these stagings include careful work on the composition and the typically photographic effects (shooting time, modification of space linked to focal lengths, reversal of the point of view, design of anamorphosis, etc.)
The different modes of presentation of photography were also examined by producing, on the one hand, series, exploring the dynamics of repetiton, on the other hand, sequences, exploring the conception of a narrative framework, as well as works functioning alone, paintings.
In order to allow students to experiment and explore the photographic medium, some of the objects produced were created using old photographic techniques (cyanotype, anthotype, photogram) which are sometimes mixed with digital manipulation of the image.
The restitution of this project was exhibited during the Festival Beaumonde in October 2022.