“SMITH’s work cannot be reduced to its asserted content on gender, identity and the relationship to the cosmos, for even though he is constantly confronted with these fundamental questions, which logically lead him to collaborate with artists from other fields and scientists from all disciplines, he goes beyond them in the aesthetic stakes that he puts into play “1.

Photographer, visual artist, director and researcher, SMITH explores the inner and outer porosities of human identity. He deploys a polycephalous research and creation methodology, joining forces with researchers, scientists, philosophers, designers, engineers, performers and musicians to conceive world-works with unlimited temporality. Disrupting genres, languages and disciplines, SMITH proposes curious works, in the etymological sense of cura: curiosity and care for the world around us, the earthly and the celestial, the human and the non-human, the visible and the invisible, imagination and fiction. By appropriating tools such as thermal cameras, drones, neon lights and metal prints, his fluid work is composed with technological means that incorporate the dimensions of mystery and dream.

Thus, through works such as “Löyly”, “Spectrographies”, “TRAUM”, “Saturnium” or more recently “Désidération”, SMITH makes his own the language of “SF” in the Harawayian sense: at the frontier of Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction and Scientific Facts. His own body becomes the site of hybrid works, integrating gender transition, microchip and subcutaneous meteorite implants, atomic mutations or trance practices.

For more than ten years, SMITH has been working, like so many dialects, with cinema, photography, bio-art and dance, in collaboration with institutions such as the Opéra du Rhin (La Filature – Scène Nationale, Mulhouse); the Centre Georges Pompidou; the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin; the Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN-ICI, Montpellier); the Fondation Hermès – New Settings; the Palais de Tokyo or the Rencontres d’Arles, which have co-produced and disseminated his works and creations.

SMITH devotes a significant part of his time to transmission in the form of conferences/performances (Collège de France and Institut Henri-Poincaré in Paris; Ryerson University, Toronto; University of California, Santa Cruz; MUTEK Festival, San Francisco; Planetarium, Centre Pompidou…). He is currently completing a doctorate in research-creation at the University of Quebec in Montreal, in co-supervision with the Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.

Born in 1991, Prune Phi is a photographer. After studying Fine Arts and a Master in Artistic Creation, Theory and Mediation, she pursued a one-year residency at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in the United Kingdom where she explored the role of curator by organizing two exhibitions in the same city. She then joined the National School of Photography in Arles which she graduated this year.
Prune Phi has exhibited at festivals and artistic events in France and the UK, during the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles or at the Mediterranean Image Center in Aude. She does an installation work made of photographs, drawings, collages, documents collected, texts and videos. She portrays and questions the mechanisms of transmission within families and communities. She is interested in physical traits that persist, or on the contrary, are diluted from one generation to another, changes in the body and its anomalies. In other ensembles, she collects and crosses the testimonies of several generations of immigrants and Vietnamese exiles on the uncertain memory of their common history.

Born in 1989 in Marseille, Camille Carbonaro lives and works in Brussels. She is a photographer, bookbinder, founder of the independent editions Macaronibook and the EATMYPAPER platform: self-publishing exhibition, micro-edition and animation of workshops and workshops around the object-book. After a theoretical training in photography at the University of Paris 8 and then in documentary image at ESA Septantecinq in Brussels, the question of the image-document was quickly installed through its series. His projects are articulated between fiction, reality and poetry. Identity, memory and self-construction are the themes: photography and narrative embroider various scenarios and model research on social evolution. For this, the modification and reinterpretation of images (collage, embroidery, photography found, archives …) punctuate the artistic approach of Camille Carbonaro.

Dominique Roux Born in Surgères (France). Lives and works in Toulouse (France)
1982-2016: Head of the Documentation Center of the Galerie du Château d’eau. Toulouse
1985-2016: Teaches the History of Photography at the University of Toulouse Le Mirail), ETPA (Technical School of Photography and Audiovisual) Toulouse and ESAV (Ecole supérieure d’audiovisuel)
1985-2016: Numerous lectures on photography
Author with Frédéric Ripoll from La Photographie (Editions Milan. Collection “Les Essentiels”)