The 2026 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention: G. Chevalier Fustec

It is with pleasure that the jurors announce the 2025 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention Winner, G. Chevalier Fustec. Fustec was chosen for his mission,  Swift & Swallow, and lately obtained a Masters from the École nationale supérieure de la photographie. The Honorable Mention Winner receives a $500 Cash Award, a function on Lenscratch, a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge, and a Lenscratch T-shirt and Tote.

From the second I started reviewing G. Chevalier Fustec’s photographs for Swift & Swallow, I used to be drawn into their quiet power and prevailing environment. I felt that I acknowledged what they had been about relatively than what they had been of, which for me was an uncommon technique to regard pictures— they appeared to talk to the sensibility of the maker whereas possessing a “mind” of their very own. I believed the pictures had been extra about seeing than wanting, so I went via the photographs a number of instances earlier than studying the artist’s assertion. I wished to determine how the photographs
labored as a physique. I’ve hardly ever seen a collection so coherent, an especial accomplishment given how illusory and elusive the “true” topic is and what number of completely different supplies, codecs, and processes Fustec “summons” and “stages” within the work. Swift & Swallow is a waking dream by which pictures function as talismans, “transitional objects,” that maintain reminiscence and carry us throughout and thru states of being and apprehension, love and loss, right here and there, then and now. I’m honored to have had the chance to speak with Guillaume about these outstanding, and remarkably shifting, photographs.

G. Chevalier Fustec develops a apply on the crossroads of images, efficiency and set up. Trained in theatre, philosophy and scientific psychology, his work proceeds from a persistent query: the right way to maintain seeing, throughout the gaps and accidents of the world, objects worthy of affection. Through the alteration, fragmentation and staging of photographs inside each other, he produces works by which the summoned supplies, ash, movie, material, grow to be transitional objects in Winnicott’s sense: signatures of a niche between presence and absence. The purpose is to render dying seen, to simply accept its necessity with out lowering it to an enjoyment of the morbid, and to show these gaps, between a world that’s all the time coming undone and one that’s nonetheless to return, into an area by which one can like to reside.

Instagram: ©G.Chevalier_Fustec

Swift & Swallow

In 2022, within the house of ten days, I misplaced two of the ladies closest to me. One of them had requested me to scatter her ashes in each place that will make me consider her. I carried these ashes in movie canisters, and later used the movie to {photograph} these locations. Little by little, this double bereavement prolonged into every little thing I encountered and did. I started to stage my photographs inside each other, to fragment and alter the negatives, and to work instantly on the prints themselves: some had been left exterior to climate and remodel, others soaked in chemical compounds to shift their tone, others projected onto surfaces and rephotographed. I various the mediums too, printing on paper, glass, aluminum, material, every with its personal texture and framing, and mixed them additional: some prints had been buried within the floor and rephotographed, others projected and rephotographed once more, in order that within the ultimate set up, completely different variations of a single picture can coexist. Finally, I additionally made photographs in locations the place I had left no ashes, locations that felt inhabited, or tied to considered one of these two ladies.

Beyond my private historical past, these losses opened one thing in me, a specific state, one which many people have certainly recognized. Reality started to talk via indicators: a chicken, the climate, a time of day, turned messages that appeared filled with that means, whereas at the exact same second that means nothing. The Surrealists known as this “la vie étrange,” a state by which likelihood, dream, and actuality grow to be porous. Nadja and Artaud are maybe those that surrendered most absolutely to this manner of studying: they gave themselves over so utterly to studying the world as a community of indicators that they risked dropping a extra grounded sense of the that means of their very own lives. This work, via the photographs themselves, their transformation, and their staging, is an account of a sure give up to this state, an exploration in and thru it.

Alexa Dilworth: I used to be very intrigued to examine your background in theater, philosophy, and scientific psychology. How did you come to images and the visible arts?

G. Chevalier Fustec: I made my first photographs whereas I used to be nonetheless working in theater. Some of that work goes again to a interval of coaching in Belarus, the place I met the individuals who I’d later go on to type an apartment-theater troupe with. As each an actor and a director, I created site-specific performances staged in folks’s flats, all the time working in situ, via shut commentary of individuals, conditions, and locations. I used to be working particularly on a play, In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès, which I by no means fairly managed to stage. That play led me to have a look at areas that had been deeply photographic, areas that appeared as if they might be inhabited by one of many characters, with none of them really being current. This style for site-specificity, already current in my performances, carried via into my later staging work. I used to be in search of areas that will operate as scenography in themselves, without having any additional intervention. The shift in scale and setting that images permits got here afterwards.

Philosophy has really been touring with me for a very long time now, and it isn’t about to cease. It isn’t only a backdrop both, it surfaces instantly within the work itself—an aesthetics of the carrion, near what Hicham Stéphane Afeissa writes about, runs via a mission of mine that was proven alongside Swift & Swallow, one which depicts a decaying calf head. More typically, visible artwork, like each different type I’ve labored in, got here out of the identical necessity: issues I couldn’t say every other approach nonetheless needed to be stated by some means, and the picture turned that different approach of claiming them.

AD:  You use quite a lot of codecs, movies, papers, supplies. Tell me about your first digital camera and
the primary photographs you made.

GCF: My first digital camera was a Mamiya TL 1000, which had been given to my older sister and which I nonetheless use, a rugged machine, good for something. Today, I exploit all kinds of cameras—primarily giant format and solely in 1.25 ratio, movie or digital—or generally simply an enlarger and chemistry. Papers and supplies matter simply as a lot, and chemical experimentation can also be of significance, generally with no picture in any respect, working instantly on the photosensitive help . . . utilizing marbling to create one thing that appears just like the traces natural matter depart on items of cloth, besides right here it’s metals colliding with one another. From my very first photographs, folks advised me they had been “haunted”: that they regarded like portraits though nobody was in them. I already know this apply, this relationship to the picture, will stick with me past this mission: I feel I’ll all the time make a picture of somebody, whether or not or not that somebody is definitely there.

AD: Swift & Swallow is so private and makes a lot sense in gentle of your historical past and pursuits. On your web site, you point out psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in reference to your use of supplies as transitional objects that sign the hole between presence and absence. I’d love you to say extra about this, for those who would.

GCF: Among the completely different paths I’ve taken, scientific psychology got here to matter sufficient that I went again and did a level in it, after theater. Winnicott’s idea refers to what are generally known as consolation objects, or “transitional” objects: issues youngsters use to handle the gap from their major caregiver. They’re objects that symbolize (although they aren’t merely representations) neither the mother or father nor the mother or father’s absence however the hole between the 2: objects that permit for separation from the topic. Photographs are transitional objects in that very same sense: a picture solely reveals issues from a “distance,” issues that aren’t there anymore. The photographic print marks that hole between us, the viewers, and the scene that was as soon as in entrance of the digital camera. The print is the signature of that hole. In this mission particularly, that signature works twice over, as I’ve stated, but in addition as a result of these photographs are all the time photographs of a haunting, a haunting by one of many two folks I misplaced.

AD: When I initially regarded via your pictures, I felt one thing in them that preceded me serious about what they had been of, what they represented. That was an uncommon expertise for me. The photographs appear to be composed equally of sensation, dream, and actuality. They are intangible and tangible on the identical time. I’d love to listen to extra about the way you each intuited and created these pictures, made them manifest.

GCF: There are two solutions to that. My first one is concerning the photographs that I haven’t altered: to start with, it wasn’t a lot about in search of a picture to make as about discovering a spot the place I might scatter one of many ladies’s ashes, as she’d requested, a spot the place I considered her.

Other locations had been already “inhabited,” both by a reminiscence, or by a robust sense that the place was by some means linked to both Nadja or Artaud. This register of photographs got here collectively by following “signs” that meant each every little thing and nothing on the identical time.

My second reply is concerning the altered photographs. These work roughly the identical approach, besides that what hyperlinks them to the 2 ladies I misplaced is the alteration itself. By following the alterations they’d undergone, and/or the adjustments in my relationship to their ghosts, sure photographs resisted these alterations. These are moments when the “signs” current within the first photographs couldn’t be learn; they had been incomprehensible, too filled with different issues. So by altering the photographs, usually by lowering what might be seen in them, the indicators turned extra legible. Without
essentially making sense, their sensation might nonetheless be learn.

AD: You write about loss and dying, absence and presence. The approach you’ve been capable of commute (remodel) the dying of your two buddies into one thing right here, one thing bodily, actually moved me. I’ve obtained messages like those you describe myself. How did you go about modifying collectively those we see right here? How did you piece the indicators collectively?

GCF: Editing has by no means been each as easy and complicated as it’s with this mission, since I’ve by no means set any restrict on the variety of photographs. Even now, if I wished so as to add one other sixty photographs to this set, which is round 120, I’d, as a result of if there are indicators, different issues, something to do with these ghosts, their place is on this mission. As for connecting them, that isn’t my job, or at the very least I don’t suppose it’s. I don’t consider in images as proof, or as a doc of fact. I consider images has by no means described something actual, and due to this fact no image ever incorporates one single, definitive fact. So, I don’t join these photographs; I’d prepare them in an exhibition, however that doesn’t produce a that means or a studying. I feel my job is to create a help, an area left open, for every individual to suppose via their very own relationship to the picture and to loss.

It is perhaps boastful of me to not trouble making an attempt to make sense with, and of, my pictures, to refuse to doc, however that doesn’t imply I’ve nothing to say. What I need to say doesn’t work via logic, via truths that may be put into phrases, however via sensation—a sensation that first expressed itself within the act of taking the {photograph} itself, and which, vulnerable to dissolving, tries to stay perceptible via the photographs. Trying to keep away from an excessive amount of dissolving is the sophisticated half.

AD: Are Nadja and Artaud the Swift and the Swallow? Would you thoughts sharing the way you got here to present this title to your mission?

GFC: Nadja and Artaud had been definitely a swift and a swallow in some previous or future lives, however no, that’s not what I’m instantly referring to. These two birds, as for many individuals, held an necessary place within the lives of the 2 folks I misplaced. The title in all probability rings in a different way for English audio system, however to a French thoughts, the birds’ names aren’t broadly recognized of their English translation, whereas the phrases swift as an adverb and swallow as a verb are very acquainted. I wished to play with this concept that now we have to “swiftly swallow” sure hardships, be taught to abdomen them, digest them quick, and it’s this French expression, translated virtually actually (vite turning into swift, avaler turning into
swallow), that gave rise to the title. To inform the entire fact, pairing the 2 phrases wasn’t my thought however one of many ladies’s.

AD: You’ve simply obtained your grasp’s diploma. Can you inform me about how your time in graduate college has formed, or reshaped, you’re serious about images?

GDC: Very deeply, first as a result of this grasp’s isn’t solely a images diploma however a analysis one too: it’s nearer to a practice-based analysis path. This course marked my relationship to images with out reshaping it, largely as a result of it wasn’t my first creative path—it might have been completely different straight out of college, or once I was youthful. I arrived with few preconceived concepts and quite a lot of drive: I realized an infinite quantity, deepened my pursuits, all whereas combating to carry on to my very own sensibility. I consider I’ve issues to say, and I need to say them in my very own voice. Philosophy held an necessary place on this analysis grasp’s too; that is the place I correctly found Hölderlin, and the place I discovered myself placing work like Afeissa’s or Jean- Baptiste Carobolante’s into perspective alongside my very own.

AD: What’s subsequent for you? What are you engaged on now? I’m very a lot wanting ahead to seeing it.

GFC: I’m engaged on a number of tasks. First, I’ll be instructing for some time within the black-and-white darkroom, and in historic photographic processes. On the creative aspect, I’m beginning a brief, quite simple collection on fetish objects tied to communities; it’s a easy collection, however a mild one, exploring why and the way these objects, additionally transitional objects maybe, crystallize sure folks’s wants and needs.

Alongside that, I’m persevering with an itinerant efficiency throughout France: a sin-eater apply impressed by previous Welsh funerary traditions. Anyone who desires to participate will confide a fault or a burden to me, which I’ll symbolically “swallow” in trade for the providing. It’s a performative piece of labor: it’s meant to be lived greater than defined.

Both of those strands, together with some analysis I’m doing on ticks, the creatures, and a few considering across the resurgence of violence within the West, are supposed to come collectively, finally, into a bigger mission that may embrace all of them. I’d like all of this to develop right into a doctorate sooner or later, it’s nonetheless too early to say precisely on what, although ritual, the physique, and violence will keep near its middle.

My gaze continues to show farther away from France as I’m going alongside. I’m additionally nonetheless carrying on with a documentary mission on Belarusian artists in exile, Le soleil est nouveau tous les jours, born out of that very same interval of coaching I discussed earlier. It isn’t completed, and it shouldn’t be; it’s a mission that has to reside.

A e book also needs to be out in October, a translation of Plato’s Symposium, conceived as a play relatively than purely as a philosophical textual content. And proper now, till the top of October, the Swift & Swallow mission is on view on the Rencontres d’Arles; it’ll then journey to Istanbul, after which on to Ankara and Izmir. Another piece, on danses macabres, is because of be proven in Paris throughout Paris Photo, as a part of the PhotoSaintGermain competition.