Elsa Brès

Elsa Brès probes, paces, gathers, and observes. She explores with her camera, puts things into perspective, and constructs narratives. With her polyphonic films, she draws up a sensible cartography of the territories she inhabits. Her work process involves research in the fields of history, sociology and geography, which allows her to root her narratives in a more or less remote past, from which she extracts forgotten stories of resistance and rebellion. From her studies in architecture, Elsa Brès retains a keen eye for the layout of socio-natural landscapes: the Mississippi Delta, a seaside town in Northern France, an abandoned canal, forests and villages in the Cévennes – all these landscapes bear the scars of industrial, commercial, touristic or agricultural exploitation. But it is through the living world that she weaves her stories, and the protagonists in her films (human and more than human) show us another way of inhabiting and imagining worlds based on the territories we live in and have the power to transform.

Translated by Lucy Pons
Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques