© Laure Barbosa.
2022

MARINE LANIER

Les Contrebandiers

Born in Valence in 1981, Marine Lanier lives and works between Crest and Lyon. She is represented by Jörg Brockmann Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland. After geography, letters and cinema studies, Marine Lanier graduated from National Superior Photography School in 2007. 

Marine Lanier exhibits her work in France and abroad. In 2016, she publishes a monography with Poursuite éditions, “Our fires belong to us”, accompanied by a text from the writer Emmanuelle Pagano. In 2022, a new monography will be published with the same editor, “Wolf Sun”.

Coming from a horticulturists and sailors family, her research turns around questions of the living, clans structures, link between adventure’s call. Her approach raises from documentary tales or “magic surrealism”. She explores shady places, unattainable, where danger and mystery glide : old  abandoned nursery of his father, a dormant volcano, the waves of a dam, the geology of a land upset by conflicts and earthquakes in Armenia, a garden-laboratory at the foot of a glacier on the plot of the epic of Hannibal in the Alps.

The marginal characters and the irrational universe fascinate her, for several years she has photographed male communities such as pruners and gardeners; or even two brothers, sort of wolf-children, living in autarky above an inverted relief in Ardèche; the itinerary of her great-grandfather Captain of the ship through the prism of sailor superstitions; smugglers and other deserters at the Italian border; a group of male prisoners who together build a coded language.

The question of narrative and metamorphosis underlies all of her work, it’s often the invention of an individual destiny split within the rituals of a group. Her plastic approach is sensory, immersive, sometimes hallucinating. She often uses the light of the eclipse, symbols, monochromes close to the color of dreams, to amazement, which transport us towards a reversal of the values ​​of this world.

THEME : Sciences of representations

Engaged in a reflection on cooperation, the mutualisation of means, the complementarity of skills and know-how, several cultural structures in the Occitania region are joining forces (the Residence 1+2 in Toulouse, the Centre d’art et de photographie de Lectoure, Le Bus – espace culturel mobile, the Agence de Développement de l’Economie Culturelle of Couserans and the Communauté de Communes Couserans-Pyrénées) and will accompany the photographer Marine Lanier in 2021 and 2022 during her various stays in occitanie for the continuation of the series “Les Contrebandiers”. 

Marine Lanier produced a first corpus of images in the Alps and the Vercors as part of the national photographic commission from the Ministry of Culture “Flux, a society on the move”, led by the Centre national des arts plastiques, in partnership with the CRP/ Centre regional de la photographie Hauts-de-France and Diaphane, a photographic centre in hauts-de-France, and with the support of the Lautaret garden and the ecology department of Grenoble University. It is the Pyrenees that she wishes to continue this long-term project “Les Contrebandiers”, a documentary fable embodied by atypical characters immersed in a timeless nature. 

© L’Ermite, extrait de la série Les Contrebandiers, Marine Lanier, 2020.

EN