Hisbacq’s poetic work, whether using her own images or in the manipulation of archival photographs, examines questions of youth, desire, rites of passage and resistance. She looks for feelings in forms and figures, exploring links between the intimate and the political.

The project “Songs for women and birds” is a set of collages elaborated from the archive images of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981-2000). Here, ordinary women fought against the installation of nuclear missiles by the United States, right here in England, which contributed to maintaining the terror of the Cold War. They used to sing in resistance to the police, and more generally to the world of domination, for the preservation of future generations, the hope of peace, the protection of humanity, and the respect of nature.

The collages focus on the way in which women inscribe their bodies in a gesture of struggle at the antipodes of the current manifestations. The first stake to communicate their revolt was to be always peaceful, even in front of the police repression. It was thus necessary to weld the bodies, in the tenderness, to make front vis-a-vis the domination which they denounced and which attacked them.

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Julia Klewaniec is a photographer and cultural animator. Currently a chief Creative Officer of Picture Doc Foundation – space for dialogue dedicated to young artists in Poland. As a photographer she deals with topics related to society, diversity and exclusion.

With “Silent Racism” (2022), Julia Klewaniec highlights the ways in which racism is normalised in today’s Polish society – and, by extension, in world society – through the use of spoken language. The artist focuses on the change in the meaning of words that were previously considered disparaging (e.g. ‘Murzyn’, a derogatory term for a black person) and are now tolerated and becoming commonplace. Interviewing black people born or resident in Poland, the artist analyses how the political and media discourse of the last 30 years has influenced the drifts and impoverishment of language, as well as the ways in which racist and derogatory expressions have become part of common speech.

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Alice Pallot is fascinated by natural phenomena, metamorphoses and silent realities. Her work questions and bears witness to the impact that human beings have today on their environment but also aspires to delicately capture the air of time. She creates universes with hybrid themes through sensitive documentaries. These visual encounters, stemming from ecological questions that emerge as signals in the young artist’s active social life, allow her to use photography to highlight ambiguities of a new and future era.

In search of freedom, during covid in 2020, Alice Pallot and her friends took a day-trip to Lommel (Belgium) and explored today’s Sahara nature reserve, where the vegetation disappeared due to the activities of a former zinc factory. To prevent the desertification of the area, a coniferous forest was planted. On this soil, a resistant fungus – Suillus Bovinus – grew, and ended up protecting the trees and the new vegetation from the toxicity of the surrounding environment. In “Suillus, looking at the sun with closed eyelids” (2020), the artist testifies to humanity its impact on the environment, highlighting the contrast between the Sahara’s idyllic appearance and its actual toxicity. This series is made without any retouches but Alice Pallot used things she found in the Lommelse Sahara to create a filter and make us look at the world through pollution.

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Daniel Szalai’s projects investigate peculiar manifestations of human-animal relationships and reflect on societal, political and economic anomalies. Szalai mixes different media in his artistic practice and also works with spatial installations.

Considering precision dairy farming, the work reflects on surveillance, exploitation and our relationship with nature. Utilising computer vision, AI and robotics, today’s automated farm functions as a digital panopticon in which cows are subject to continuous monitoring. Quantifying all aspects of their life, technology allows treating each individual as a mere dataset. This can be seen as surveillance capitalism applied to animals, and a means of consolidating the distance between humans and animals by virtualization and gamification. Szalai addresses these issues by rendering cows using photogrammetry. This 3D-scanning technique represents its subjects as a cloud of information and gives the work a ‘sci-fi bucolic’ character in which the datafied existence of animals belongs to a technological landscape perceived through digital means. Besides, the work comprises a collection of salt licks that provide a counterpoint by bringing in materiality and the agency of the cows.

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