MYRIEM KARIM
FACTORY #4
ARBORESCENCES
Myriem Karim has created a serie on the impressive trees of the Garonne-Ariège confluence wetland. In partnership with the association Nature En Occitanie and the Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne, this series was exhibited as part of the photographic summer of the art and photography centre of Lectoure from 25 July to 20 September 2020.
Trees evolve in the landscape to which they belong and modify it. Looking at a landscape is an engagement with the world. There is an ecstasy: this way in which things stand beyond themselves. The dimension of time opens up, of its sedimentary layers, its rhythms, its slowness. Trees are a promise of permanent movement that exists. We do not see them as mobile. We do not live long enough to see them grow.
How do you get a tree into the camera frame? A whole forest? What do you see in a forest and what do you see with photography in a forest? Is it a good tool for observing trees? There is a density of the forest contrary to the relationship to the horizon. To the view from afar. To atavism. To look at the trees, you have to switch to a world where the communication channels are vertical.
The challenge is not so much to capture reality as to translate impressions of reality. For it is all or part of their life that escapes us with the naked eye. To perceive the interiority of trees is to look through the branches and foliage, from the young shoot to the cells and molecules. To collect the experiences gathered around them and inscribed in their limbs. Touching the plant matter. Come back, observe. Repeat the photographic process. For they are never formally identical, even though they are rooted in the same place. Witnesses of the passing of time and of the unstable composition of landscapes.
NATURE EN OCCITANIE : The association Nature En Occitanie manages the Confluence Garonne Ariège Regional Nature Reserve. Created in 1969 and recognised as being of general interest, its aims is to protect and promote the regional natural heritage.
MYRIEM KARIM : Born in Nanterre in 1991, Myriem karimm has approached the relationship between the body and space through dance and she has taken up her photographic practice through literature. The work of the photographer Denis Riches made her discover that literature could interweave with photography. In 2016, she completed her master’s degree in Literature with an aesthetic study entitled: (Des)saisissement du Temps avec Notre Antéfixe by Denis Roche, obtained with honours under the supervision of the philosopher Pierre Zaoui at the Université Paris Diderot. Her photographic work questions our relationship with places and matter associating poetry and photography, two media she considers both independent but complementary in their practice. Her photography always tells the story of a body and a landscape space, enhance their interactions and reciprocity, a look inside a landscape, an observation of uninhabited, natural places, which questions the relationship of mutual traces and imprints. Her images revisit places she has already photographed during random peregrinations (Je suis venue ici, already 2018). This repetition is an integral part of her artistic process and the vagaries of silver photography make it possible to have an experimental approach. In the autumn 2019, she was the winner of the Résidence 1+2 Factory at the Confluence Garonne-Ari7ge Regional Nature Reserve in partnership with Nature En Occitanie. In 2020, she was awarded the Grand Prix MAP/CD 31 and she exhibited her series Nous habitons la nuité de notre corps. In her practice Myriem Karim is in search for what is original and for the ties that bind us to the world and the time. Myriem Karim lives and works in Montpellier.