M TSAMBORO LAURA HENNO

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1 PRESS KIT M TSAMBORO LAURA HENNO Exhibition from 26 October to 24 November 2018 Opening Thursday 25 October from 6.30 pm to 9 pm Press requests : s.borderie@fillesducalvaire.com

After her exhibition, which attracted attention, at the latest edition of the Rencontres d Arles, she is presenting at the gallery all her work produced in the Comoros.

2 M TSAMBORO LAURA HENNO Exhibition from 26 October to 24 November 2018 Opening Thursday 25 October from 6.30 pm to 9 pm The Galerie filles has the pleasure of announcing the solo exhibition of Laura Henno, M Tsamboro. After her exhibition, which attracted attention, at the latest edition of the Rencontres d Arles, she is presenting at the gallery all her work produced in the Comoros. Série Les Pilotes, Comores, Série Ge ouryao! Pourquoi t as peur!, Mayotte, 2018 du calvaire In front page : Série Djo, Mayotte, 2017 As a continuation of her projects created in Réunion, in 2009 Laura Henno began working in the neighbouring archipelago of the Comoros, the regional epicentre of migration and its related repercussions. Although until then she had focused on the representation of young people implicated in marronage, referring to the act of runaway slaves escaping from slavery, which is now again used to describe the fleeing strategies of migrants, here she looks at the landscape of migration and the lives of people smugglers. M Tsamboro, the title of the new exhibition at the Galerie filles du calvaire, thus refers to a small uninhabited islet of the Comoros archipelago where unscrupulous people smugglers leave migrants they have tricked and who were hoping to arrive in Mayotte. This insular trap then becomes the place of the first disillusions for these exiled natives of the Comoros, obliged to hide from the border police and their dogs. Through several new pieces and the film Koropa, which has received many prizes, M Tsamboro multiplies the perspectives on this territory full of contrasts, both illusory and very real, rendered in a poetic realism, but never idealised. The M Tsamboro installation, a triptych projected onto a single screen, places the visitor in front of the intersecting destinies of several children from the same family, who the artist has been following for four years, all of whom have trained to be people smugglers. At the helm of their small boats, they are brought back to a childlike innocence (noticeable by the decalomania of one, the satchel of another, and their pink customised paddles), which they nevertheless are on the way to losing. Frozen in a heroic posture (Eli backlit and bathed in a halo of light) or, on the contrary, confronted by the harsh realities of the job (Nasser ill, Mokatir with swollen feet), they embody the tragic condition of a humanity adrift, exposed to all risks and dangers. Placed in the opposite direction to the boat s trajectory, in silence, the spectator witnesses the infinite wandering of these young driver-guides who seem to constantly return to their departure point. Freed from the narrative form, Laura Henno s

3 Koropa (film), 2016 et Spectre Productions images here lend themselves with even greater ease to a game of interpretations: the children may be training or playing the role of prisoners unable to escape from the island, the doubt in their eyes recalls unattainable horizons, here symbolised by the islet of M Tsamboro, which appears in the background, floating and unstable. This piece can be appreciated in direct continuity with the film Koropa, which depicted the passing on of people smuggling work between Ben and twelve-year-old Patron, whose point of view the current work adopts. Although the terse form sets up a certain distance, the frontal framing openly conveys the violence of the situation, that of a child who is made to grow up too fast and to take illegal routes where he risks his life. The yells and whistles that resonate throughout the exhibition arise from the film Djo, which tackles the marronage question by focusing on the figure of the dog. Originally imported by Westerners to chase the maroons (runaway slaves), now used by the police to hunt down migrants, the animal was notably adopted by the people of Mayotte to protect their lands. The film takes the form of a timeless fable, in which Smogi recounts the story of Djo, the shepherd of the mangroves who he rescued and took in, before returning to the hills of Série Ge ouryao! Pourquoi t as peur!, Mayotte, 2018

4 Mayotte, only coming down again for the rainy season. Through these demonstrations of freedom, of which the entire work constitutes a vibrant plea for an animist vision, where dog and man would be equal, Laura Henno revitalises the beliefs of the Comoros people in an invisible world, within a culture where resorting to magic softens the grimness of reality. Série Djo, Mayotte, 2017 The exhibition is complemented by photographs taken at the same time as the films were shot, as well as a new installation, for which Henno followed a group of young, undocumented Mayotte and Comoros natives, entitled Ge ouryao! (Why Are You Afraid!), a current interjection, which has become a leitmotiv in the dialogue between the artist and her subjects). These contemporary maroons, living in a group in a banga, an improvised shack built on the beach, also form a community with their dogs, which act as pets, a means of defence and attack weapons. Deconstructed and distributed around the gallery space, the installation reproduces the form of a shattered geography that reflects the lives adrift within its confines: at the crossroads of territories, the image conveys the way these lives are relegated to the periphery of society, the edges of the city or to the island s shores. This marginal space, the site of forced clandestine behaviour and circumstances, has by this fact become the centre of an active resistance, of which the latest revolts on the island of Mayotte are the raw expression. With M Tsamboro, Henno nourishes a mysterious imaginative work like a place of release, for a poetic exile. Without preaching or taking a militant position, with this exhibition Laura Henno opens up a space of reflection, projection and escape, where fiction facilitates an access to reality. Children s dreams, local beliefs and migrants life stories and fantasies in fact constitute so many narrative constructions through which spectators are made aware of concrete situations and can then form their own judgements and vision of the wandering man at a time of globalised migrations. Florian Gaité Translated by Sandra Reid This exhibition is produced with the warm collaboration of Nathalie Gonthier and the support of the BBB Centre d Art (Toulouse) and Fondation Carasso.

LAURA HENNO Born in 1976 in Croix, France Lives and works in Paris, France Iris Lou Laura Henno initially trained as a photographer and studied film at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts

5 LAURA HENNO Born in 1976 in Croix, France Lives and works in Paris, France Iris Lou Laura Henno initially trained as a photographer and studied film at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains. She was the recipient of the New Discovery Award at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d Arles in For several years, she has based her approach to photography and film on the issues of clandestine migration, in the Comoros, Réunion Island and Calais. She confronts herself, with a documentary aim that reinvests reality with the potentials of fiction and storytelling. The resulting images provoke a disturbance and draw from pictorial and cinematographic codes. Her work has been shown in many museums in France and abroad. In 2018, she presented her series Redemption (produced in the United States) at the Rencontres d Arles. In 2017, the BBB Centre d Art in Toulouse cast the spotlight on her series M Tsamboro. In 2013, her work was shown in the Missing Stories exhibition at the Centre régional de la photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais in Douchy-les-Mines and the Dunkirk Museum of Fine Arts. In 2011, she was exhibited in the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland. Laura Henno has also participated in many group exhibitions, among which Paysage Français : Une Aventure Photographique ( ) at the BnF François Mitterrand in 2017, alongside a hundred major photographers, the Sharjah Biennial 2017 at the Beirut Art Center in Lebanon, L effet Vertigo at MAC VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine in 2015, Femina, ou la réappropriation des modèles at the Pavillon Vendôme in Clichy in 2015, and Voices of the Sea at the Calais Museum of Fine Arts in She has been awarded several prices for her film Koropa, including the Equality and Diversity Award 2017 at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and the Grand Prix for Short Film 2016 at the Entrevues de Belfort. KOROPA (Movie, 2016) / AWARDS Festival Angers Premiers Plans 2016 Prix des bibliothécaires Entrevues de Belfort 2016 Grand Prix du court-métrage & Prix Camira pour le court-métrage Festival International du court-métrage de Clermont-Ferrand 2017 Prix Égalité Diversité Les Écrans documentaires, Arcueil 2017 Mention spéciale du jury 5 Internacional Festival Signos de la Noite Lisboa 2017 SIGNS AWARD for documentaries Festival de Cinéma Européen des Arcs 2017 Mention Spéciale Beijing International Short Film Festival, Chine 2017 Oustanding Achievement Award

IMAGES AVAILABLE Série Les Pilotes, Comores, 2016-2017

6 IMAGES AVAILABLE Série Les Pilotes, Comores, Série Ge ouryao! Pourquoi t as peur!, Mayotte, 2018 Série Djo, Mayotte, 2017 Koropa (film), 2016 et Spectre Productions Série Ge ouryao! Pourquoi t as peur!, Mayotte, 2018

7 Press requests : s.borderie@fillesducalvaire.com

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