Two exhibitions highlight the work of documentary photographer Mathieu Pernot. Through an assembly of diverse documents, he shows fragments of lives on the margins, from inmates of the Santé prison to migrants who have arrived in France.
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Mathieu Pernot practices image capture in the broad sense: for him, taking pictures is part of a broader enterprise of collecting traces, archives, pre-existing images, or collective production of documents. His two current exhibitions in Paris are built around a heterogeneous set of documents, articulated thematically.
The Atlas in Motionat the Collège de France, shows migrations on several scales: the human one, the story of refugees who arrived in France at the end of a long journey; the broader one, of nature as a whole, which, from the circulation of pollen to the revolutions of the stars, is always in motion. Alongside Mathieu Pernot’s photographs are testimonies from refugees in the form of stories, drawings, views of the sky or cartographic tracings of their journey; all “ways of telling what they are through images”, to use the photographer’s words.
For his exhibition at 104, the photographer organized an “escape of words and images.” Health makes visible what should have disappeared with the Parisian prison of La Santé at the time of its destruction: the interior of the cells, and the inscriptions and images found on the walls, which became a surface of expression during the detention.
It features cut-out magazine pages – from pornography to religious images to advertising for luxury brands –, annotated world maps and graffiti, repositories of the imaginations developed in situations of confinement.
From these scattered documents, these two exhibitions construct multi-voice narratives, hollow portraits of actors that Mathieu Pernot refuses to constitute as photographic subjects, preferring to give them a voice in a roundabout way.
During this interview, the photographer traces the genesis of the two current exhibitions, and offers a guided tour of theAtlas in motion.
