the white paradise

We enter these virgin territories with a kind of fragility, anxious and unknowing what we may find on this frozen ground. What do we know of the poles, or of the sudden losses of balance that can disrupt our lives? What do they even have in common? On the surface, nothing. Yet this series by France Dubois reveals the echoes between the two.

In a glacial setting of unbroken white, she summons a silent, unknown world, in which every step is muffled. We feel the need to whisper to avoid shattering the apparent harmony emanating from the landscapes and portraits. But the faultline is there, infinitely small or expanding – there is what we see and what we miss, like an iceberg about to drift.

We seesaw between the power of the elements and the crack that will start our emotions melting like ice sheets. Beneath the rock, the end of a world, rumbling soundlessly. It’s a slow process that no-one can understand without having experienced it. The drift of the poles and the drift of living beings; it exists, and inexorably it engulfs us.

In the hostile territory of the poles, nature offers a wonderful allegory: we have to walk this earth to come back transformed, to access our own strength, to embrace all our fragility. We must protect our constituent elements to attain the imperfect balance, the balance pole that guides the world and our lives; listen to our deep nature to better preserve it.

France Dubois’s approach, reflecting images of a collapsing world that resonate with portraits of people experiencing periods of fragility, asks this question: what if accessing our own vulnerability could reconnect us with what binds us to the living world as a whole, ourselves and the nature that surrounds us, its immensity representing the possibility of being reborn, and living in harmony with all our faults and cracks.

Text from Marie Lemeland