Antoine Bruy, Scrublands
Exhibition and book

12 April – 18 May 2018 – Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière (51 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’ïle, 75004 Paris)

As part of the HSBC Prize for Photography exhibition at galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Antoine Bruy, new member of Tendance Floue, presents his series Scrublands and his upcoming book to be published by Editions Xavier Barral.

Scrublands

« From 2010 to 2013, I hitchhiked throughout Europe with the aim to meet men and women who made the radical choice to live away from cities, willing to abandon their lifestyle based on performance, efficiency and consumption.

Without any fixed route, driven by encounters and chance, this trip eventually became for me a similar kind of initiatory quest to those of these families. Eight of these experiments are shown here, and display various fates which I think should not only be seen at a political level, but more importantly as daily and immediate experiences.

The heterogeneity of places and situations shows us the beautiful paradox of the pursuit of a utopia through permanent empirical attempts and sometimes errors. Unstable structures, recovered materials, or multiple applications of agricultural theories allow us to see the variety of human trajectories. All of which aiming at developing strategies to gain greater energy, food, economic or social autonomy.

These are in some way spontaneous responses to the societies these men and women left behind. Therefore their land is exploited but never submitted, the time has lost his tight linearity to become a slow and deliberate pace. No more clock ticking but the ballet of days and nights, seasons and lunar cycles. »
Antoine Bruy

« Antoine Bruy’s subject, geographically confined to specific territories, is treated with all the rigour of the genre. Portraits and landscapes adopt the same voice to relate how, on these scraps of land, people have woven artefacts and natural elements into a strangely homogeneous material. »

« There is a path running through Antoine Bruy’s landscapes that connects all the men, women and children whose faces he has captured. It is long, steep and winding and leads the person who follows it up into mountains, far from any trace of city life.»
Raphaëlle Stopin

> Press release