Our High Ten from Arles

Retratistas do Morro, João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta, Reflections from Serra Community, Belo Horizonte (1970-1990)

Retratistas do Morro is a wealthy tribute to João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta, two self-taught photographers who’ve spent a long time documenting life contained in the Serra favela in Belo Horizonte, southeastern Brazil. Conceived by artist Guilherme Cunha, the undertaking is a component archive, half dwelling reminiscence, together with over 250,000 images to disclose a deeply native, often-overlooked historical past. The chosen pictures displayed at Arles seize on a regular basis magnificence and resilience, providing a counter-narrative to the methods through which favelas are so usually portrayed. The work transforms nostalgia into a press release on company, illustration, and remembering and, by way of these portraits, the neighborhood sees itself.

ENSP Generation – Calista Bizzari Malou, Mathis Clodic and Rıfat Göbelez

Featuring three new graduates from Arles’ École nationale supérieure de la photographie, ENSP Generation contains stand-out, modern work by rising artist Mathis Clodic. Re-entering the dusty digital ruins of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a recreation that formed a era, Clodic gathers glitchy, half-forgotten “Out of Map” landscapes, eerie reminiscence areas frozen in 2009, the place burning helicopters are nonetheless smouldering in An Eternal Wasteland. Using moist collodion images, he turns discarded recreation avatars into ghostly portraits, fragile and surprisingly human, whereas in his video piece, Le Dormeur du Val, he overlays this digital terrain with Rimbaud’s poetry, suggesting a soldier endlessly asleep. Clodic’s work appears like a digital archaeology, much less about gaming, extra about reminiscence, trauma, and the emotional residue left behind in our digital playgrounds.

Strangers, Jia Yu, 2024 Jimei x Arles Discovery Award winner 

Located a couple of metres previous Arles prepare station in a disused SNCF prepare hangar, Jia Yu’s Strangers is a blended media exhibition combining video interviews proven on screens, portraits displayed naked to the wall, and objects laid in a case. An essential demonstration of images’s energy to construct, honour and affirm reminiscence, the paired-back set up lets Yu’s work communicate for itself. Yu, an elementary college instructor from the Tibetan area, has been working with communities on the Tibetan Plateau for over 20 years, making work collaboratively and with their permission; alongside the portraits are movies of Yu’s return visits, through which he tracks down his topics and offers them prints of their pictures. This act of trade is essential; one woman had by no means beforehand had her portrait taken and, seeing her youthful self for the primary time, displays on the passage of time. Yu additionally shows the presents given to him by the communities, together with yak rope, clay, and medicinal herbs; some presents are much less materials, the woman singing him a standard tune, for instance, sharing her voice in thanks.