France

Julien Mauve

www.julienmauve.com

Biography

Julien (b 1984) is a visual artist based in Paris, creating cinematographic and narrative photography series dealing with human interactions and conditions. My work raises questions about our future, the threats that our civilization is facing, the quest meaning and our relationship with technologies.

He has been rewarded by several prices including the SFR Jeunes Talents (France) in 2013, the Sony World Photography Award (UK) in 2016 and La Bourse du Talent (France) in 2018. I have published two books together with Poursuite Edition: L'Indifférence Des Étoiles (2016) and Titanic Orchestra (2017).

Mauve has been a Sony global imaging ambassador since 2013. Julien is represented by Galerie Intervalle in France and INTHEGALLERY in Denmark.

HyBrazil is a phantom island, appearing in different locations on nautical charts as early as 1325. Many stories exist of encounters with the island. According to the legend, it is a cradle of an advanced society that has remained hidden until our days, veiled as it is by thick fog, which has kept it from being discovered. In 1850, the island disappears from every map completely.

Julien went searching for this mysterious island and found it in Japan. The 21 pictures in the series come from the Island of Dragonflies (Akitsu Shima), the name of which echoes nature’s powerful place in the Japanese imagination. On this island, humans seem to have suddenly disappeared. What remains are some sorts of ruins, lost in the middle of abundant nature which seems to retake its rights. Have these sites been definitely abandoned or just isolated from the rest of humanity?

This project acknowledges an impoverished landscape and loss of space due to the inhumanity of the structures we choose to build. In this mixture of grief and hope, the characters appear on the point of disappearing within the fog that engulfs those urban utopias, considered at the time of construction to be symbols of progress. Disembodied witnesses, they become actors in a play of which the ending is uncertain.

Back To Childhood

A while ago, I was hanging around in my grandparent's attic. What I found among other things was a box full of toys I used to play with as a child. Each of them reminded me of a particular moment of my childhood and I felt emotionally connected to them. Instead of storing them back into their box, I tried to imagine what they could look like in our adult world. Going further than their power to generate nostalgia, toys offer those who animate them a marvelous power to reinvent the world.

"One might say this is landscape work and entitle it "Variations on a Nightscape". And that would miss the whole point. In each of these lived-in landscapes, for each of these rigorously situated buildings, a light is scouring the depths - a light that has not yet been turned off or that has already been lit.

This really is the 'subject' of photography, its punctum, which denotes the personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. Asking about our relationship with light - and hence also photography. Telling of our hopes and fears. Bringing out the fact that but for the existence of light the world would not exist before our eyes. And in each image instilling an enigmatic form.

Anxiety and the danger of shadows mixed in with safety and well-being."

Christian Caujolle, founder and artistic director of the French photo agency, Agence VU