WITH ALL OUR MIGHT
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WITH ALL OUR MIGHT .
WITH ALL OUR MIGHT
FR
PRIX & EXPOSITIONS
2024 Festival Mesnographies, Les Mesnuls (France), du 1er juin au 14 juillet 2024
2023 Prix & Festival Objectif Femmes, Paris (France)
2023 Maison des Photographes UPP, Paris (France)
2021 Chico Photo Review & Prize, Montana (USA)
PRÉSENTATION
« With All Our Might » est un projet d’exposition et d’édition où confluent les questions de paysage, de climat et de société. Explorant les corrélations entre ces différentes notions, je façonne des images où la désertification de l’Ouest Américain devient une métaphore de l’assèchement de nos ressources et de notre humanité.
La Californie, cinquième puissance économique mondiale, est aux premières lignes du réchauffement climatique. Les vagues de chaleur, qui y sévissent depuis plusieurs années, ne sont pas de simples sécheresses temporaires ; elles sont bien le résultat d’une désertification progressive de la région.
Aux portes de Los Angeles, le désert californien est devenu le carrefour improbable d’une des régions agricoles les plus riches des États-Unis et d’une économie marginale, où la pauvreté, la criminalité et la drogue sont endémiques. Les montagnes attenantes constituent un terrain d’essais et d’entrainement pour l’armée américaine. Les barons de l’eau y livrent une bataille impitoyable aux collectivités territoriales, tandis que le Colorado River, surexploité, s’assèche à grande vitesse. Centre d'un curieux écosystème, la région est le théâtre d’un désastre écologique imminent.
Le réalisateur John Waters semble en avoir saisi l’essence, décrivant la mer de Salton notamment, comme un lieu “où l’utopie et l’apocalypse se rencontrent pour danser un tango sale” *. Cette atmosphère de fin du monde n'a cependant pas empêché une population marginale de s'installer dans le désert californien – par choix ou non, à court ou long terme.
Aux villages de caravanes, marinas à l’abandon, courses de buggy tout terrain et âmes échouées sur les rives de cette mer intérieure se juxtapose l’opulence de Palm Springs. Entre frivolité et fin des temps, en quête d’appartenance, nous nous retrouvons face à une frontière immatérielle et invisible : une vision sublime et détonante, où la beauté et l’horreur, l’abondance et la misère, le génie et le sordide cohabitent.
Dans un système qui glorifie la croissance, la productivité, la performance et la positivité à tout prix, nous nous retrouvons déconnectés de notre propre humanité, en difficulté face à la tâche qui s’offre à nous et nous dépasse.
À travers une approche topographique, je présente des images dénudées de tout artifice : quelques intérieurs silencieux, des visages fatigués et l’absence dans l’immensité de paysages arides – comme autant de naufragés d’un modèle économique en rupture avec les crises de notre temps.
Accompagné d’une série de poèmes en prose, que j’ai pensés comme les paroles de musique pop indépendante américaine, « With All Our Might » aborde les notions de nostalgie, d'aliénation et d'un romantisme qui s'effrite sous la lumière implacable du désert californien.
Cherchant à nourrir une transversalité des pratiques et à développer la dimension dystopique de ce projet, j’ai commissionné Liz Harmer, écrivaine canadienne primée basée à Los Angeles, pour écrire un texte d’autofiction qui accompagne ce projet d’édition. Ce texte est intitulé «The Last Free Place».
* Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, un film documentaire de Chris Metzler et Jeff Springer, raconté par John Waters
EN
AWARDS & EXHIBITIONS
2024 Mesnographies Festival , Les Mesnuls (France), June 1st–July 14, 2024
2023 Objectif Femmes Festival & Photo Prize, Paris (France)
2023 Maison des Photographes UPP, Paris (France)
2021 Chico Photo Review & Prize, Montana (USA)
PRESENTATION
“With All Our Might” is an exhibition and book project addressing the questions of landscape, climate and society. Through these notions, I’m drawing a parallel between the desertification of the American West and the drying up of our resources and our humanity.
California, the fifth economical world power, is at the forefront of global warming. The heat waves, which have impacted the West Coast in recent years, are not temporary droughts; they are the result of the region’s progressive desertification.
At the gates of Los Angeles, the Californian desert has become the unlikely crossroads of one of the wealthiest agricultural regions in the country and an alternative economy, where poverty, crime and drugs are endemic. The nearby mountains are bombing & training grounds for the American Army. The water lords are giving ruthless battle to local governments, while the Colorado River, overused, is drying up at high speed. Center of a curious ecosystem, the region has become the theater of an imminent environmental disaster.
Filmmaker John Waters seems to have grasped its essence *, depicting the Salton Sea shorelines as a place “where utopia and the apocalypse meet to dance a dirty tango.” This doom-laden atmosphere has however not kept a marginal population from settling in the Californian desert – by choice or not, short or long term.
Next to villages of trailers, abandoned marinas, buggy races, and washed up souls lies the opulence of Palm Springs. Between frivolity and the end of time, longing for home, we find ourselves facing an immaterial and invisible border: a sublime and fractured vision, where beauty and horror, abundance and misery, genius and sordid coexist.
In a system that glorifies growth, productivity, performance and positivity at all costs, we find ourselves disconnected from our own humanity, in great difficulty facing the task ahead beyond comprehension.
Through a topographical approach, I present stripped-down images: a few silent interiors, some weary faces, and absence in the immensity of arid landscapes – so many castaways of an economic model estranged from the crisis of our time.
Along with a series of short prose poems, which I developed similarly to lyrics of American indie pop songs, “With All Our Might” addresses the notions of nostalgia, alienation, and a crumbling romanticism under the relentless light of the Californian desert.
Aiming to nurture the cross-pollination of practices and to develop the dystopian dimension of the project, I’ve commissioned Liz Harmer, an award-winning Canadian writer based in Los Angeles, to write a short autofictional piece to accompany this book project. The piece is titled ‘The Last Free Place’.
* Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, a documentary by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer, narrated by John Waters
WITH ALL OUR MIGHT
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WITH ALL OUR MIGHT .
“The Last Free Place”
A piece of prose by Liz Harmer
I hadn’t felt free in a long time, so I drove to the Salton Sea. But I know as well as anyone that driving in a car doesn’t make you free. There’s only one way out of a body.
For a while the trains were the only architectural features along the 111, the slow snaky vertebrae of them.
If I lived among the trailers and slabs of Bombay Beach, resort town of some other generation’s dream, I knew I’d lose track of what’s a ruin, a broken-down thing, and what’s art, what’s beautiful, what’s real. The white fire engine: is it real? The sign demanding to stay off the grass: real? The church, the opera house?
The train I passed was not in a hurry. Its long lines recalled all those painters with their parallel lines and horizons. I passed a shaggy forest of palm trees, city blocks of sprinklers, long stretches of vines. The green, red, blue, white cars on the lazily moving train.
The Salton Sea was not ugly as I expected. It shimmered under a blue sky, looked as vast as the Pacific except for the hints of shadowy mountains on the other side. At the Visitor’s Center I learned the sea was in the process of dying. Evaporative, the Visitors’ Center welcome video said. Evaporative and brackish. On the beach, pulverized fish bones crushed under foot like glass, but there were no carcasses and there was no smell. Pulverized barnacles brought in to this accidental sea by naval vessels during World War II.
“No fish left in the Salton Sea,” said a sixty-something man in the visitors’ center.
“How do the birds live?” I asked.
“The birds live on the fish in the very north shore and the south shore. There are pelicans if you want to see them.”
“The fish are mostly dead now?”
“If you want to see the birds,” the man said. “There are plenty of birds.”
Perhaps the Lord saw what his people wanted and said: very well, here I will give you a miraculous lake. Instead of irrigation a catastrophe of leakages, seepages, an inability to stop punching holes in a thing to make it bleed. Maybe in 1905 people didn’t believe in the future. There is no way out for the water of the Salton Sea. It must evaporate, get saltier and saltier, like anybody, like any woman in her mid-thirties who does not know what she wants.
I wanted to hallucinate. I wanted to get heat stroke and to see God. I wanted to feel how accidental everything is and how stupid.
I saw an enormous metal overhang with pylons all the way down the road. Border patrol trucks. In a metal fence in Niland someone has spelled out “God Bless America.” And here is where I would see God. I would be like the man who built Salvation Mountain, who got up each morning for a coffee and then painted all day. Who scavenged for art in the dump nearby and who wanted you to know that God is love. On the way there are roadside hippies in tents, white hippies with long dreaded hair and long skirts.
At Salvation Mountain, it had been raining, so the whole enormous piece was blocked off by ropes. A large woman with a deep voice was driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee around the site, clutching the front door closed with an arm as it squeaked on rusty belts and brakes. She shouted: “I gave you an inch and you took a mile!” She shouted, “That’s enough, ladies!” A model with big natural hair was standing on some painted ground in a yellow, feathery dress, trying out faces. A photographer was crouched at her feet saying, yes, yes. Other young women in John Lennon glasses were posing for each other’s phones. The model and photographer edged sheepishly away. Whispering yes, yes.
A group of white American tourists stood, watching this. Adult kids and middle-aged parents, someone elderly. “Why can’t we go in,” one said. “She’s scary,” said another. The mountain was gorgeous with unnatural colours, a cross against a blue sky, everywhere verses. Remember the sinner’s prayer, that you are a sinner. That you will punch holes in a thing to make it bleed. Say this prayer and keep it simple.
(A billboard on the way to Palm Springs: When you die you will meet God.)
“Most days,” the keeper of the mountain and the driver of the Cherokee says, “I love this job. But it’s been raining and this is just clay and paint, clay and paint. You go in there and you just wreck it. It’ll be a slip-and-slide.”
Only the cats go past the ropes. One of the well-meaning tourists tries to coax a cat away—“be careful, kitty, not safe, kitty”, as though she knows everything about this place and the cat knows nothing when the opposite is true. I myself know nothing about this place. Behind me is a small boat that may never have been sea-worthy, white and blue painted over a painted dirt ground. A boat to remind you of floods and droughts, of Biblical apocalypse.
I told myself that when I wanted to succumb to my madness, I would move to Slab City.
Slab City is The Last Free Place. Nothing costs anything here and people make homes. There were many strange signs, though, Confederate flags and American flags and aggressive reminders of how blessed everyone is. When people fly flags they are like wolves marking posts with piss. There were the yellow flags of the libertarian. There were mannequins like scarecrows over the Center for the Miraculous Enlightenment of Man. Somebody offering breakfast, somebody offering sewing classes, witches, wise men, bartering around dirt roads. I waited for a long while in my car. I smoked a cigarette and made sure to take it with me. I liked the word die-off. I liked the name East Jesus, but also I wanted to go home. I was only a tourist, no good at treading lightly like a cat. It’s hard not to be a barnacle, hard for a person not to invade.
Knowing it is important, I told myself. Isn’t it? At least I am not deceived.
