MINUIT BRÛLE
Exhibition by Cendre
Curated by spazioSERRA and Agathe Kalfas
In collaboration with Experimental Photo Festival
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On display from 06/05/2024 to 17/05/2024
Opening Monday 06/05/2024 at 19:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan
MINUIT BRÛLE (Midnight Burns) is the site-specific exhibition by Cendre, invited by spazioSERRA to showcase a personal project at the Milanese exhibition space as a result of the collettivoSERRA’s collaboration with Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona. The exhibition is visible from Monday, May 6 to Friday, May 17, 2024, at the Milan Lancetti railway station.
Cendre's work revolves around multimedia experimentation, including analog photography, video, and ceramics. The artist aims to revolutionize our cultural imagination by redefining our relationship with all forms of life, exploring the intricate connections between humans and the natural world.
In 2015, after being a victim of a homophobic aggression on the streets of Bordeaux, Cendre decided to file a report at a police station. There, the police officer blamed the full moon. This event isthe starting point for MINUIT BRÛLE, a transmedia project in which the artist explores how trauma can define a person, both destructively and transformatively.
MINUIT BRÛLE explores three intertwined cycles: the lunar cycle, the menstrual cycle, and the cycle of aggression. Cendre uses their menstrual blood as a matrix to alter their negatives, thus the images become an extension of their body to work on. From the altered negatives, they photographed the moon in different phases of its cycle. They also focused on the figure of the predator, the wolf, in relation to the feeling of being prey in a public space. Through alteration, the images exist despite and because of the damage suffered, between destruction and care.
The installation The Pack, hosted inside the octagonal space, materializes the cycle of homophobic attacks in France: it consists of 180 risographs of the same photograph, that of a wolf, installed to create a cage composed of 42 chains. These 180 images correspond to the 180 annual physical homophobic attacks in France reported on average over the last 3 years to SOS Homophobia.
The moon has never been the culprit
I carved a talisman on my skin
The night is part of me
The stars look at me
I look at them
And the moon protects me
Cendre (Thionville, France, 1992) is a non-binary emerging visual french artist based in Saint-Étienne, France. Self-taught and an ecologist by training, their work is about the invisible, the relationship between humans and living beings. Their work was exhibited in collective exhibitions during EXP21 and EXP22, the Experimental photographic festival in Barcelona, projected at Les Nuits photo film festival in Paris (2022, 2023) and at La Nuit de l’année during Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023.
Agathe Kalfas (Saint-Étienne, France, 1989)
Art director, journalist, curator, picture editor, trainer and photography consultant, Agathe Kalfas pursues a wide range of activities in the field of visual arts, between Arles and Paris. After starting her career in the French cultural network abroad, she became in 2014 Director of "Parole de Photographes », a structure dedicated to promoting photojournalism and image education. In 2019, she founded her consultancy - AK Whispers - in which she supports photographers in the development and distribution of their creative projects.