Wall of the French Embassy

21^st Nov 2024 – 28^th Feb 2025

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We know that some important scientific discoveries are born from dreams. We also know that, over time, everything changes, evolves. The earth, our bodies, species, animals, plants are transformed, and, over the long term, real mutations occur. Species disappear, others appear, and everything can be different.

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The former student of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie of Arles, who first was a creative director and photographer in the field of advertising and film industry works about time, past and future. With images that come as much from his imagination as from his readings, films that inspire him, scientific research that fascinates him as much as the world of science fiction he loves.

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Did these plants from Flora incognita (Unknown flowers), these animals from Auctus animalis and Post Natural History exist centuries ago or are they categories to come? The false Latin names invented by the author as if to give them a scholarly and scientific value are only used to make us react and think. Or smile and dream.

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These flowers that could exist tomorrow seem animated by an inner force that allows them to offer us an elegant dance.  Photography evokes it and builds the collection of an herbarium for the future. The animals, themselves, can be combinations of technology and current species that we easily recognize but they are endowed with new powers, which does not prevent them from being simply beautiful, even more beautiful than some that we know. A world beyond nature that borders on perfection, which does not exclude humor, is often present.

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Vincent Fournier, who demonstrates an absolute mastery of the technique, takes us into a museum of hybrid creatures from his own universe.  A fiction that could happen and which, for him, translates “the nostalgia for the dreams of the future when I was a child”.