At Les Mesnographies, What We Refuse to See — Blind Magazine

First, Lyhanna. Eleven years outdated. She disappeared on her manner residence from faculty and was discovered useless in a grain silo, between two villages within the Gers area in France. Four complaints for the rape of minors had already named the prime suspect; he had by no means as soon as been questioned by the police. The complete nation was outraged, 6,000 individuals marched in white in Fleurance, and the political class produced its solutions: chemical castration, inserting prosecutors below political supervision, abolishing the sentence-enforcement decide. Answers that say much less about childhood than concerning the coming election. Meanwhile, the suggestions of the unbiased fee on incest, submitted in 2023, lie in a drawer.

Here is a rustic that calls itself horrified, then appears elsewhere. This turning away doesn’t belong to the judicial chain alone. It has its administrative model too — well mannered, nearly courteous. Since 2022, the Maison Jean Monnet, in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, has supported Les Mesnographies photograph competition, within the neighbouring village of Les Mesnuls: donating practically 3,000 euros annually to supply an exhibition on the local weather. In 2026, the competition stored that strand intact — the poisoned lands of Texas, photographed by Caroline Ruffault, the very present it had proposed to hold at Jean Monnet — however selected incest as its primary topic, below the title “Je te crois” (I imagine you). The establishment’s reply got here in March: it had proved “very difficult, even impossible, to find a link” between this focus and its mission. “This elasticity is not infinite”, its curator famous. The partnership ended. Claire Pathé, the competition’s founder, filed a criticism for “maladministration” with the European Ombudsman. On June 12, the newspaper Le Monde published an article recounting the affair.

The absence of a hyperlink: that, exactly, is the topic. Claire Pathé’s counsel, David Koubbi, factors out that each one twenty-seven EU member states have legislated in opposition to incest on minors, and that the identical establishment hosted, in 2025, a paper-flower workshop and readings of Colette and Giono — ties much more tenuous to the European Parliament’s legislative work. So the issue is just not the hyperlink. It is the topic. Incest unsettles; paper flowers don’t. The reflex is a well-known one: to relaxation your eyes on what doesn’t harm. The competition’s wager is precisely the other.

Je te crois. Three phrases Claire Pathé selected in echo of her very personal historical past — raped by her maternal grandfather, she has stated, from the age of eighteen months to 10. Seventy submissions arrived from world wide after the open name. Seven had been chosen. Seven photographers who testify with their faces uncovered, and whose braveness holds the room way over the theme does.

Juliette Andréa Elie boiled her childhood pictures in a shower of avocado skins: the little lady she was taking over a pink tint, “a faded pink”, and the storm softens. The blue thistle clings in all places, stinging, lodged in some unreachable nook of reminiscence. “Home Is Where It Hurts” doesn’t present the wound; it exhibits the 336 hours spent, each Thursday for years, in a psychotrauma unit, and the sluggish labour of pulling out the thorns. Mika Sperling, already proven on the Rencontres d’Arles in 2022, minimize her grandfather out of the household archive with surgical precision: the erasure makes him directly invisible and responsible, whereas the kid she was stays intact. The title, “I Have Done Nothing Wrong,” is the abuser’s denial turned again in opposition to him. Lucie Sassiat — one in every of whose pictures, a faceless little one in a striped gown, accompanies this piece — gathered her clues “like gathering the pieces of a crime with no body”, and refused to show the abuser right into a monster: she reveals his banality, extra chilling nonetheless.

Around them, Mathis Benestebe probes his traumatic amnesia below the blue mild of childhood objects; Sergio Melendez revisits the Peruvian home area the place violence was directly current and hidden; Virginia Morini and Maëva Benaiche dig by way of the archive and thru blocked reminiscence. What strikes you, throughout this physique of labor, is the restraint. The photographs don’t eat the ache; they offer it a spot. Photography right here, as one of many artists writes, is just not “a tool of exposure but of care”. To maintain that line throughout seven collection operating, with a topic this incandescent, is a real act of curation. The credit score belongs to Claire Pathé.

Yet the competition can’t be lowered to its focus. It consists of twenty-two artists, of fifteen nationalities. The different strand — “Le jardin n’est pas clos” (The backyard is just not enclosed) — is exactly concerning the local weather, the very factor the Maison Jean Monnet declined to relay: Lisa Sorgini’s Australian bushfires, Kinga Wrona’s Galician mariscadoras, Marjolijn de Groot’s plastic packaging fused to our bodies. And the broader world: Hashim Nasr’s blue cones raised over a Sudan one has fled (his picture stands on the poster), Vic Bakin’s stained print, developed with the final of his fixer as Ukraine burned, Rie Yamada slipping into the household pictures of strangers.

And the competition convenes as a lot because it hangs. The Enfants Kintsugi endowment fund, led by Vahina Giocante and Laurent Bloch, stands as patron of this version, in addition to Florence Moll, director of the company FMA Le Bureau. On June 12, a staged studying written from the photographers’ accounts preceded an open dialogue; on the thirteenth, a spherical desk on denial and impunity; on the nineteenth, the screening of a documentary dedicated to 4 males abused as youngsters. The college students of the Lycée Jean Monnet — sure, that identify once more — labored there on immigration. The Maison Jean Monnet couldn’t discover the hyperlink. It is the best of all. The one which runs from a picture to a sentence of three phrases, from what we see to what we comply with imagine. I imagine you. The complete competition is there.

Today, Blind is partnering with Les Mesnographies and invitations you to find essentially the most placing collection on view in massive format, by way of a publication devoted totally to the competition.

The competition Les Mesnographies is on view, freed from cost, till July 19, 2026 at Les Mesnuls, within the Yvelines.