46 / Les fouilles de la Verrerie / Pauline Rousseau

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Chambre 46

Thème : Arles et l’Architecture

« Les fouilles de la Verrerie »

In 2013 archeological excavations in the Trinquetaille district of Arles resumed after several years. The operation revealed amazing murals from the first century BC. Their finesse and preciousness bear witness of the luxury.
After taking pictures of the ruins, I worked on the images to build dreamlike evocations. Between past and present, the murals from the luxury Pompeii’s villa becomes again a mural in a luxury room millennia later.
The infinitely small is turned into a large format photography and the fragment becomes the art piece.
Pieces of the mural shape an imaginary map. It evokes different territories: territories known or unreal, territories to be apprehended, to be invented, to be appropriated. Like the different strata of the Arlesian soil and the treasures kept inside.

Born in 1989, Pauline Rousseau graduated from the École du Louvre in 2012 and from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in 2016. This same year her work was exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, at Agnès B’s galery in Paris, at the Yvon Lambert foundation in Avignon. In 2016, she was awarded a grant for a post-graduate residency at the International Centre of Photography in New-York. In 2017, her first personal show opened in Toulon.
At the same time, she developed theoretical researches. In June 2016 she was invited to talk about this subject at the CAPC in Bordeaux. This talk was part of a program about feminism in contemporary art. With audacity and irony, her work questions the bargaining between the photographer and the model, and the boundary between reality and fiction, reality and fantasies. She pursues her work in Paris, where she is now using different media as photography, sound, installation or video.

www.paulinerousseau.com