EARTHS, DEAP SOILS OF GREATER PARIS - Anne-Marie FilaireSession EPFL

Anne-Marie Filaire is a photographer. For more than twenty years she has been preoccupied with the question of landscape, inaugurated with series made on her native Auvergne land at the request of the Landscape Photographic Observatory. Since 1999, she has been pursuing a long-term work in the Middle East, Israel and East Africa regions to recount the factual reality of endless wars, the intimate concerns of populations facing geopolitical fracas. Her work is a poetic exploration of man in its environment. In 2017, she exhibited and published a work on demarcation zones (Zone de sécurité temporaire, Textuel/Mucem).

Since 2019, she has been documenting the sites receiving the soil that is being excavated from Greater Paris construction sites. Revealing the telluric dimension of these large-scale infrastructure works.

“The extension of the limits of Paris is a gigantic project that changes our perception of urban territory, our exchanges, our lives, our identity. This immense mixing of the earths of the Ile de France shipyards, moved around the edge of the new capital, redefines a territory, and this political dimension of the excavated earths is here an expression of Greater Paris. Choosing to photograph this state of the landscape, before it disappears and happens again, is a work on the future.” AMF

ANNE-MARIE FILAIRE is a photographer and teacher at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Her photographic work has been presented at numerous institutions and museums in France and abroad, the Museum of Art in Ein Harod (IL), the Sharjah Art Museum (UAE) and the 7th Sharjah International Biennial, 2005; in Paris, at the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Museum of Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM), in Marseille, dedicated a monographic exhibition to her work in 2017. She co-authored the monograph Zone de sécurité temporaire (Textuel/ Mucem, 2017), best photography book award of the Festival international du livre d’art et du film 2017. Her recent works ‘Terres, sols profonds du Grand Paris’ have been published at La Découverte in 2020, and exhibited at the Hamburg Triennial in 2022.