Texts by Mathieu Lion, Annie Gachelin, Charles Stépanoff, and Cédric Beaudoin
It was said in the Normandy countryside that the earth was originally without fire, and it was Roitelet, one of our smallest birds, who brought it down from the sky to gift it to humanity. By reviving the forgotten oral tradition, the photographic series Manifestation du mythe extends this ancient tale and confronts it with the contemporary landscape.
Fire is one of our oldest allies in shaping our environment. While its status has changed in Western modernity, increasingly being associated with a threat, an enemy, the photographic work questions our representations of flames. Rather than fostering nostalgia, this interest in the peasant culture of the past invites us to care for the countryside of today and to find in the traces of an ancient cosmology the means to evolve our relationship with the idea of nature.
Mathieu Lion
Photographe
Mathieu Lion, born in 1991, graduated from the École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias de Caen in 2015. Initially trained in social sciences before being introduced to contemporary forms of art, his work is driven by an anthropological curiosity. His projects have been supported by the DRAC Normandie, the Normandy Region, and the Ministries of Culture and National Education. He was notably a recipient of the Création en Cours program in 2019 and the Culture-Justice program in 2017. These experiences confirmed his social commitment and the intertwining of his projects with the territory and its inhabitants. His images have been featured internationally by the American magazine Subjectively-Objective and have been part of repeated collaborations in poetry and music publishing.
