Eliot Nasrallah
Paris, France
ARTIST BIO
Eliot Nasrallah is a French-Lebanese artist based in Paris. He has been leading a research regarding images’ process of appearance and disappearance in relation to the fragility of territories in the Mediterranean basin. Going between analog and digital technics, his practice encompasses various reproduction means through experimentations of the photographic medium. From alternative printing methods, bookish objects, field recordings to video installations, his works intends to reveal the plastic and narrative possibilities regarding the representations of memories. If the series of images unfolds into a form of mysticism and abstraction, the gesture of association that activates them seems to participate to the build-up of a memory in perpetual construction. From personal archive to the document-image, his work questions the capacity of images to testify the story of their own making in the face of the impermanence of certain contexts. His project «La dernière visite» has been awarded by a collaboration between Passepartout and Yogurt Magazine. In 2021, his book «Août 2020, Cher Journal,» was nominated for the Kassel Dummy Book Award. He teaches photographic and editorial practices at the Ecole Duperré (Paris, France).
PROJECT STATEMENT
Les yeux fermés (Eyes Closed) is a photographic, video and sound research project where several protagonists will investigate various natural environments to engage bodily in a quest for self-reconstruction. A spiritual journey taking place in different parts of the Mediterranean basin, and ending later in the crater of a still active volcano in Greece.
This work grew out of a situation caused by the disappearance of a place. A context that inevitably raises photographic issues linked to representations of memory, but also to broader questions that resonate with absence. Therefore, this research focuses on the states that the body must sometimes experience in order to generate new healing processes.
Similarly to an initiation narrative, they are withdrawn into themselves, inevitably returning to the embryonic state in order to establish contact with various fragile forms of life. Nesting in restrictive situations, the body gradually is able to reinforce its weakened foundations. By getting involved in the construction of new landscapes, the body will draw on various forms of living matter in a gradual attempt to get back on its feet, leading up to its encounter with the volcano known as Stefanos.
Finally, the video work that closes the photographic series reveals a sequence in which the body is this time guided by the volcano through a mystical and almost meditative walk. A meeting between two bodies about the mysterious phenomenon of resilience, in which the volcano, shown here as both figure and danger, is approached as a metaphor for a lost paternal presence.
An attempt to explore how the body can become involved in a therapeutic healing process, but also, at the role played by photography when a performative dimension is used to construct images. Here, intentionally darkened, the photographs ask us about our difficulty in determining their birth or disappearance.
