Ce que la lumière n’a pas fini d’écrire - Opening

The exhibition of Juliette Larochette and Alix Perrin "What Light Has Not Finished Writing" is situated at a pivotal moment between two visions: that of a territory shaped by industry and that of the life forms emerging there today. In Saint-Étienne, post-industrial landscapes are becoming spaces of transition where working-class memory and the dynamics of life coexist. The project brings into dialogue two forms of testimony: work clothes and the plants that colonize wastelands.

The worker's smock, passed down and transposed into the artistic realm, acts as an artifact of social memory. It bears the traces of a body, a use, and a collective history still inscribed in the landscape. In contrast, spontaneous plants become sensitive indicators of the transformations underway. They grow in the interstices, reclaim the soil, and signal the emergence of other forms of existence. These elements bear witness to a passage: from a world structured by production, extraction, and labor to slower temporalities, where life gradually recomposes the environments. The works unfold through photography, archives, cyanotypes, anthotypes, paintings, and collected materials (plant pigments, rust, charcoal, glass).

Light, time, and alteration act as active forces, producing evolving images. Conceived as a series of layers, the project reveals the territory as a palimpsest where multiple states coexist simultaneously.