“Assisted Sanctuaries 3.0”
2024 - 2026
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Interactive sculptural systems where biology, mythology and technology converge. Bringing together Infinite Movement, Void and Hijack Archeology, the works explore preservation as a fragile balance between living processes, material transformation and technological support.
Microbiological collaboration: Henri Burgeat.
Selected presentations of the works: Dover Street Market Paris; Institut Pasteur, Paris; MONOM, Berlin
"Before it all burned, Remains"
2009/2025.
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It began with a series of analogue photographs taken in Russia in 2009. Ten years later, the images were manually transferred onto the glass panels of
a greenhouse-like shelter for La tête dans les nuages, first exhibited at NWB in Berlin in 2019.
In 2020, the structure was brought back to France and installed in a field in the French countryside - temporarily returning the images and the architecture to the landscape.
A year later, the shelter was burned in a performance conceived by the artist, with Marie Polo as performer, Mario Cordero as DOP and Alice Girard as photographer.
What remained was collected from the ashes. Fragments of glass, photographic matter and traces of combustion were recovered, cleaned and reassembled
using medical and biological instruments - shifting the gesture from destruction to examination, preservation and reconstruction.
These remains became the final artworks.
Preserving the Disappearance
2022 - 2026
Originating in an installation in Brussels, this body of work explores photography as a material suspended between preservation and disappearance. Photographic images first took on an architectural scale, forming illuminated structures within a weathered interior. Light revealed their surfaces and placed them in dialogue with the traces of the surrounding space.
The subsequent resin works bring this exploration into a more intimate form. Analog photographs printed on silk paper are sealed in resin and held within metal supports. Evoking fossilization, the process preserves the images while altering their texture and legibility. Figures emerge and dissolve, caught between recollection and erasure.
From spatial installation to individual fragments, the works ask what remains of an image when its material changes—and whether preserving something also means transforming it.
Liquid Memory
2026
Microalgae cultivation system that alters a silver-based photograph; installation dimensions: 42 x 62 x 122; photo dimensions: 20 x 30
This installation juxtaposes two forms of preservation. Photography attempts to freeze a moment in time, while an artificial circuit attempts to keep a living organism circulating. Their encounter renders these two processes incompatible: by keeping the biological material active, the device gradually alters the image it was meant to preserve. Photography thus ceases to be a fixed representation and becomes a recording surface, accumulating successive traces of life.
Rewriting History, Hijack
2020
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This installation brings together two historical artifacts connected through personal lineage: a World War II military fuel tank, suspended in a state of impossible equilibrium, and a series of original daguerreotypes taken by the artist’s great-grandfather during the war.
The massive steel vessel appears frozen in the instant before impact, its pointed tip resting delicately upon a field of photographs that bear witness to the same historical moment from which it originates. One object embodies the industrial machinery of conflict; the other preserves its human traces.
Rather than reconstructing history, the installation explores the transmission of memory through material. The fuel tank no longer functions as a military device but as an archaeological fragment whose physical weight contrasts with the fragile surfaces of the images beneath it. Together, they collapse different temporalities - personal, historical and geological - into a single suspended moment.
Neither monument nor memorial, the installation invites viewers to consider how history persists through objects, how violence becomes embedded in matter and how inherited memories continue to shape our perception of the present. While rooted in the memory of the Second World War, it inevitably resonates with a present in which armed conflicts continue to reshape landscapes, cities, and lives across the globe. The distance between history and current events proves increasingly fragile.
CONSACRÉ
2024
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Kosho-ji Temple, Kyoto, Japan - Presented as part of KG+, during KYOTOGRAPHIE
CONSACRÉ brings photography into dialogue with the architecture and gardens of Kosho-ji Temple.
This Photoscape installed along the garden paths become part of the landscape, their surfaces altered by shifting light, shadows and the viewer’s movement.
Performances by Marie Polo and a sound installation by adc303 extend the work beyond the visual, introducing gesture, duration and listening. Together, these
elements create an encounter between photographic memory and the present moment, exploring how an image inhabits a place and acquires new meaning through it.
Jusqu'ici tout va bien
2019
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Project with the Goethe Institut (Paris & Ljubljana) - ' Frei Raum '
Tivoli Park, Ljubljana, Slovenia
This installation draws on letters written by Edouard Burgeat’s great-grandfather to his family while imprisoned by the Nazis during the Second World War. Held within translucent elements on a steel framework, the correspondence forms a wall across a park pathway, interrupting the visitor’s passage.
Created at a time of renewed border closures, the work places this physical obstruction in dialogue with the memory of those who fought for freedom.
The wall becomes both a barrier and a surface of transmission: it restricts movement while allowing light, words and the viewer’s gaze to pass through.
Bringing a family archive into public space, the installation connects an intimate experience of captivity with contemporary questions of freedom, separation
and belonging. The letters preserve the effort to sustain human connection across enforced distance, asking how the freedoms inherited from earlier generations are upheld, or restricted, in the present.
Isn't killing the first game ?
2024
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An interactive installation composed of analogue photographs transferred onto an eight-metre stainless steel structure.
Visitors were invited to reveal the images by gently rubbing away the paper covering their surfaces.
Conceived and created by Edouard Burgeat for the POV exhibition, the work brings together his photographs with those of Hugo Schmitt and Tristan Savoy.
Its gradual transformation became a collective performance unfolding throughout the exhibition.
The photographic sections were subsequently cut from the structure and framed. Each retains traces of the visitors’ gestures, allowing the installation
to persist as individual works.
Voyage par temps de Covid
2022
The project began with a journey across European borders in defiance of lockdown restrictions, in a Citroën Jumper with Marie Polo and a wolf. Borders became both a lived constraint and a central question of the work.
Presented at 35–37, Paris, in March 2022, the van became an interactive photographic, sound and spatial installation. Visitors used water and their hands to rub away the paper covering photographic transfers, gradually revealing the images on its body.
The van was later dismantled in the studio. Photographic fragments recovered from its metal body were cleaned and framed in black steel, forming a series in which travel, collective gestures and material transformation remain embedded.
The resulting works were subsequently exhibited at Dover Street Market Paris and at Galerie Olivier Waltman during Paris Photo.
