Monde Flottant II (Floating World II)

A nomadic artist, Lucile Soussan defines herself above all as a hunter-gatherer of images. Photography is the raw material of her work. By shaping her “harvests” through drawing and engraving, she blurs the line between memory and imagination.

Her chiaroscuro prints pay homage to the work of American photographer George Shiras, but here, the furtiveness of the shot is transformed—through the aquatint engraving process—into a near-mathematical study of light. By “painting” successively from brightness to total darkness, she unfolds the depth of the images and attempts to pierce the mystery of these ink-black nights. “The thin white lianas rise in the penumbra like the strings of a giant harp,” wrote explorer Raymond Maufrais in his journal before disappearing in French Guiana.

The near-total absence of fauna stages the idea of a shift in “reign,” as Jean-Christophe Bailly puts it, where the animal, lurking in the shadows, stands at the threshold of the image.

At sea, however, it crosses the page. To draw these creatures is to discover a form of camouflage that lies not in texture or color, but in light. Here, the animal is a wave, a lens through which the environment is distorted. A “body-scenery,” as Georges Didi-Huberman writes in Phasmes. To depict these simulacra, Lucile Soussan disguises the paper more than she draws on it. These animal encounters, as fleeting as they are immaterial, seek to restore the sensitive context in which animals live. “The more we know, the further they recede,” writes John Berger in Why Look at Animals?