Cécile Monnier’s work questions the ways in which human practices and personal memories shape our relationship with ‘nature’.  By combining photography and installation, she is looking for new ways of learning to see living things*[1] and rethinking our relationship with them.

The exhibition presents two works that explore Cécile Monnier’s personal and artistic reflections on the relationship between man and nature. In ‘Tout est fichu comme un sandwich à la soupe’, she looks at the practice of fly fishing – a symbolic interface between humans and their environment. She is interested in the way in which anglers care for the habitat that is the river, while at the same time disturbing it. Photographs of hand-made artificial flies, combined with a video installation, question the aesthetics and ambivalence of an activity that connects humans to a habitat and an ecosystem, but also reveals the power relationships and dependencies that are established between them.

In ‘turn around, turn around, turn around’, Cécile turns to her own past. The photographic installation, in which images are suspended from the ceiling in the form of continuous strips, is not only a visual tribute to her childhood in the countryside, but also a reflection on the way in which our experience shapes our relationship with nature. Here again, the interdependence between man and what he observes, cultivates or nurtures is complex. Cécile sees in the memories of rural life a link between individual responsibility and the urgent and universal need to re-consider our relationship with the world. This work serves as a prologue to her artistic approach, emphasising the dialogue between past and present, and between man and other living things.

[1] Estelle Zhong Mengual, Apprendre à voir : le point de vue du vivant, 2020

About the artist

Cécile Monnier (*1982, lives and works in Lausanne) is a freelance photographer. She has a Bachelor’s degree in sociology, a CFC and a higher vocational diploma in photography from the CEPV, as well as a Master’s degree in Visual Art from EDHEA. Active in architectural and art photography, she teaches in various schools. She has exhibited in Sion, Martigny, Fribourg and Basel. Her work has also been recognised in the Young Talent Award for Photography 2020. In 2022 she was the winner of the Enquête Photographique Fribourgeoise, with her project des nuits sans silence.

Additional programming

• Guided Tour with Danaé Panchaud, March 13, 6-7 p.m.