Sylvain Gouraud

"La nature des équilibres" [The nature of balance] is a narrative unfolded in the form of manipulations of photographic prints on a table placed in front of a screen. A light camera on a tripod transmits the images live behind the performer.

The body of photographs and interviews was compiled by Sylvain Gouraud over the course of a ten-year investigation into farming practices. It unfolds through a series of specific anecdotes to describe a number of farming practices from the point of view of aesthetics.

Taking the term 'Age of Enlightenment' literally, this work hypothesises that, since the seventeenth century, the development of vision techniques and the evolution of our way of thinking have gone hand in hand. Seeing and knowing become intertwined as the great modern adventure changes our perspective, placing us humans above the world and in a position of domination over living things. This investigation through images and about images brings together a constellation of thinkers, artists and farmers, past and present, who have witnessed and played a part in the changing face of our countries.

Sylvain Gouraud is a visual artist born in 1979 and trained in photography at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He immerses himself in environments where human beings arrange their practices in such a way as to negotiate their place among living beings, both human and non-human, in order to build with the players involved an accurate representation of complex issues. His work takes the form of books, meetings and exhibitions combining photography, sound and video. His work has been exhibited at museums such as the ZKM in Karlsruhe, as part of Bruno Latour's Reset Modernity exhibition, at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris. His collaborative practice extends to the areas where he works, in psychiatric hospitals in Alsace, prisons in the Île-de-France region and rural areas such as Rostrenen in Brittany and Majastres in the Alpes de Haute Provence. He was one of the winners of the Ateliers Medicis/CNAP les regards du grand Paris grant with his project Un ensemble, and has just completed a short film entitled D'ici, de là, produced during a residency at the Pays Centre Ouest Bretagne as part of the Centre Pompidou's hors les murs programme. His photographs are part of the collections of the CNAP, the Frac Alsace and the FDAC Essonne. His work has appeared in the press, with illustrations for Télérama, Billebaude, Architecture Aujourd'hui and Libération.