A photography festival is only ever up for a few months. Tada! Come and have a look! Then, bang! It disappears. The very idea of a photography festival — bringing works of art from all four corners of the world — may seem incompatible with sustainability. But let’s not forget some of the green jewels of what is widely celebrated as the biggest photography festival of the world: the Rencontres in Arles. This year the opening week drew in 19’500 visitors and professionals from all four corners of the world, even surpassing the visitor numbers reached during the festival’s 50th anniversary.
So does photography rhyme with sustainability? There was last year’s project created by the art collective Ritual Inhabitual that examined how indigenous Mapuché people in Chili are struggling to safeguard biodiversity and in particular medicinal plants. The Mapuche people, who have inhabited southern Chile way before the country was even founded, have faced eco-violence as their forests have been forcefully replaced by monoculture. This exhibition looked at how temperate rainforests in Araucanía, the south of Chile, have been replaced by pine and eucalyptus in order to serve the interests of the paper pulp industry, thus opening up a debate about current models of consumption and the struggle between our consumption habits and protecting and safeguarding biodiversity.
And not to forget Matthieu Asselin’s 2017 project on Monsanto, exploring the horrific health and ecological consequences wreaked on huge swathes of population. Asselin examined dozens of Monsanto’s Superfund sites across the US (large contaminated sites), poring over the details of the horrific health and ecological consequences While Monsanto was busy working on disseminating new products and technologies, scientists, ecological safeguarding bodies and human rights organisations were sounding the alarm bells. This exhibition allowed Asselin to take a close look at the myriad issues such as public health risks, detrimental impact on food safety as well as undermining ecological sustainability.
But back to Arles 2023, and here we are sat in a small square overlooking cafés and restaurants, and Marine Stéphan, who works in the partnership department of the festival, is telling me all about the festival’s holistic approach to sustainability — embodied, she says, in each of the two-hundred-strong team working day in, day out to pull off the festival. Above and beyond the many thematic approaches to sustainability as highlighted, the whole of the festival team is working around the clock to ensure sustainability is embedded from A-Z as part of a conscious, overarching process to ensure the festival, something fleeting in nature, does all it can to use as few resources as possible, to reuse whatever resources it does use, and, above all, to raise awareness.
As Deputy Director Aurélie de Lanlay exclaimed when Marine and I bumped into her on our way to the weekly market, hopping off her bike, “Sustainability is what we’ve been doing for a long time here at the festival. It’s about time we start telling people about all the work we’ve been doing”. Queue my quest to find out more in the safe hands of Marine Stéphan.
First exhibition. We wander into the 12th century building Cloître Saint-Trophime and straight into Julien Arnaud, a scenographer from Ghost House who works in close collaboration with the artist and the curator, co-creating a fitting scenography. We’re surrounded by Eva Nielson (artist) and Marianne Derrien (curator)’s exhibition Insolare, which examines the rural world near Arles known as The Camargue, and in large part protected by UNESCO. Arnaud’s bluey-green eyes are glittering with the kind of adrenaline that tends to be found on stage as he explains how he strived to create a greener exhibition where air circulates and flows, weaning off traditional A/C and dehumidifiers. Ghost House, the artistic and scenographic arm of the project, opted for airy metal frames that encourage better air circulation rather than traditional partitions which cut the space up and make the room even warmer (it’s already mid-30C outside).
Upstairs, Marine and I make our way around the upper floor of the same building. The upper floor of the cloister traces the photographic journeys at Sète of Agnès Varda. Here again we witness another simple yet efficient solution: at the end of the room a fan stands where an AC-unit would usually be found, and long, vertical, window-like boxes have been cut out of the cloisons to allow the air to circulate throughout the room.
Suddenly, scenography is taking center stage, stripping our attention from the shots of Sète and the sailboats (a difficult feat for anyone who knows me)!. Away with traditional partition walls that you find in national galleries, hello wood, metal, air. As De Lanlay explains over the traditional Sunday breakfast, tackling the standards for preventive conservation (which have existed for the best part of 40 years now) is a massive challenge. Existing temperature and humidity standards pose great challenges, especially for a festival held in the south of France at the hottest time of the year. If these standards were to be a tad more flexible, huge amounts of energy would be saved.
Transport, too, is one of the bêtes noires of the festival — how's it going in Arles? Well, by train, by foot, from bike… The festival actively promotes public transport use and Car-sharing to get to the festival. Its website lists train and bus options first, then finally tells you how to get there by car. And in case you didn’t get the message yet, there’s a helpful capitalised “THINK ABOUT TAKING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION!”.
To move around the city there are plenty of eBike taxis (thank you, Taco and co!) which you can hop on if you struggling to walk in the mid-30s sweltering heat. Within the festival the team uses a cargo eBike to transport items from one location to another. As for the works themselves, the team recently took the decision to group the works of art and transport them in bulk (some, for example, come from as far as the US), to bring down the number of trips and emissions. As Aurélie explains, it all boils down to the curator’s responsibility.
Above and beyond creating greener structures (mono materials, airy, cut out holes), De Lanlay assures me that 100% of the materials used are recycled. The festival boasts a whopping 5000 m² storage in Arles and at the outset, the scenography is originally conceived for more than one festival. Julien Arnaud, the Ghost House scenographer, explained to Marine and I that the scenography was originally conceived both for Arles 2023 and Paris photo in November 2023, and has specifically been designed with modules which provide an almost limitless array of possibilities. As De Lanley says, the Arles festival is a test bench of sorts a "laboratory for artists to test out new ideas”.
Now back to the materials. De Lanley ensures me that the festival ensures 100% traceability. Be it ink, wood, paper, or any other material. This utmost commitment to an ethical, greener festival is rooted, says De Lanley in the personal commitment of each member of the team and flows up in a bottom-up fashion. The festival is militant in the very best French sense of the word, as reflected in an open letter written by the festival team, up at the exhibition space Grand Contrôle for all to see.
De Lanley illustrates her team’s dedication with countless examples, one of which I can’t forget: as soon as the artworks arrive, her staff take it upon themselves — and have been doing so for ten years now — to painstakingly remove the bubblewrap (which itself is specially closed with tape that doesn’t pierce it). Once they’re done this each item of bubblewrap is inventoried and safely stored until the end of the festival, then reused again. Imagine if this happened in every factory, office, home…
While the croissants and coffees were being prepared for the annual big breakfast, something that struck me is all the different generations perching on the stairs, running around, laughing, talking: babies, toddlers, kids, teenagers, students, young professionals, middle-aged parents, retirees. The festival kick-off coincides with the first week of the French school holidays, so it's also the perfect opportunity to reach out to all ages, in particular the youngest ones, and to raise awareness about how we can make the world greener, and why we urgently have to do this.
How can all of this work be summed up? Soul-searching and relentless pursuit of better standards? It's all about pooling heads and resources, coproduction (better production means reaching a bigger audience). In short, a process of scratching away our old ideas and re-thinking. As we were coming out of Roberto Huarcaya at Croisère, Marine spotted the photographer Matthew Asselin, well-known for his 2017 exhibition on Monsanto, otherwise known as “The Company That Owns The World’s Food Supply”. Asselin sat up in his deckchair as he spoke. Photography, he told me, has to be more than rehashing the same old catastrophic photos that document the dreadful consequences of climate change or pollution. Instead of these old clichés of a burning, flooding, litter-filled world, we have to tackle the root causes of the power imbalance.
This is precisely what Asselin does in his latest photo documentary at the Grand Contrôle exhibition space in Arles. Alongside photographers Tanja Engelberts and Sheng-wen Lo, in his exhibition Hunting the Tarasque, Mathieu Asselin charts the impact of the factory Fibre Excellence, situated just a stone’s throw from Arles. Specialised in the production of pulp for paper, the artist from Arles delves into the various types of pollution caused by the factory, and we come full circle from Rituel Inhabituel as the links between consumption models and risks posed to sustainability come under the lens.
Asselin delves into the power structures of multinational corporations and brings them to our screens and our conversations. As he says, it's not just a question of creating lovely fluffy emotions. Photography, Asselin urges, “Has to be part of a wider social movement to call out, loud and clear, the problems plaguing our planet. Hand in hand with other media such as text and video, we have to raise awareness about the ecological violence wreaking havoc on our world.”
And raising awareness, making education more accessible, is precisely something that the festival is 100% committed to. It can’t go without saying that Arles is one of the most deprived municipalities in France where this is urgently required. The question about education, however, deserves a whole other conversation of its own. In the meantime, I’ll be busy doing my own home inventory, charting the materials I use, where they come from, and identifying which changes to make to do better…
