PARIS.- After Fata Morgana in 2022, Jeu de Paume is proud to unveil the second edition of its festival dedicated to the evolution in the contemporary image, with a programme featuring an exhibition, performances, screenings, evenings, workshops with artists, and a book.
Moving Landscapes, presented from 7 February to 23 March 2025, is imagined as a collective narrative, combining representations of natural environments and the imaginative repertoires used to convey them. Curator Jeanne Mercier has invited screenwriter Loo Hui Phang to collaborate in the form of a voice that narrates the works—many of which were specially produced for this event — by fifteen artists, active on the current art scene. Each piece makes use of a natural space — the jungle, oasis, sky, desert, forest, etc. — associated with certain stereotypes, but offers a new imaginative repertoire to evoke them.
The festival, which gradually reveals a sensory and highly personal story of our relationship to the world, also seeks to be a space where visitors can reflect on contemporary topics, whether environmental issues, questions of identity, and migratory flows.
Designed as an immersive and interactive experience, this latest edition of the festival offers the public an artistic fresco where the worlds of photography, literature, and science come together and are transformed: the landscape becomes a living and constantly shifting territory.
A reflection on the world: the environment under threat
The works showcased in this festival explore several key themes, including climate change, and invite us to rethink our responsibility as humans towards the environment, whether polar, island, or forest. Julian Charrière opens the festival with a work entitled Towards No Earthly Pole – Conway (2019), immersing viewers in the Arctic and Antarctic, regions that bear witness to the effects of global warming. Taken from An Invitation to Disappear, another film by the same artist, co-directed with philosopher Dehlia Hannah, the images and works connected to this film, including the lava lamp and charred wood, explore the links between nature and artistic creation, and serve as a tribute to the two-hundredth anniversary of the deadly eruption of Tambora in Indonesia. On another island in peril, Richard Pak explores the tragic fate of Nauru, devastated by phosphate mining. In his photographic installation, he captures the lost beauty of the destroyed landscapes but chemically alters them, thereby endowing them with a mythological dimension in the manner of a modern- day oracle. With Racines (2020 to 2025, a work specially produced for the festival), Andrea Olga Mantovani offers an introspective journey through the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine. In this mysterious place, the artist questions our relationship to primary forests and links family past, collective memory, and current geopolitical issues.
Memory and migration: territorial accounts
Other works in the festival examine migratory and cultural memories. In her installation .cóm (2025, a work specially produced for the festival), Prune Phi explores the history of her Vietnamese family and the colonial migration policy that encouraged the development of intensive rice farming in the Camargue. The work, an installation that evokes a rice paddy, heralds the start of a fiction that plays out at the foot of the rice plants. Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars (2022) brings together complex biographies that overlap and interact: the past and anti-colonial freedom fighters in central Africa, the uncertainty of the present, the search for belonging, projection into the future, and the desire for symbiosis with the environment. In this video work, a woman carefully observes the surrounding nature, a metaphor for a feminine space combining several temporalities and places. Mathieu Pernot on the other hand, shows a special interest in the circulation of knowledge in L’Atlas en mouvement (2022), a work created in collaboration with refugees.
Mixing astronomy, botany, and cartography, this collective project traces the paths of exile and humanity’s shared knowledge. Finally, the installation by Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher recalls paradise lost in a submerged forest where humans come to the brutal conclusion: they have no other choice but to live apart from animals.
Contemporary mythologies: reinventing the imaginary repertoires of the modern world Throughout the project, the artists explore the myths and imaginary stories that shape our relationship to landscapes and cultures. Inspired by Congolese traditions and Kasaian cultures, Tales From The Sources (2025, a work specially produced for the festival) by Léonard Pongo presents the landscape as a character with its own will and power. The superposition of images, layers, tracings, and projections recreate a complex and vibrant landscape: the work is like an open book telling the story of humanity and the planet, with Congo as its epicentre. In The Scylla/ Charybdis Temporal Rift Paradox (2025, a work specially produced for the festival), Mounir Ayache draws his references from Greek mythology, the animated series Ulysse 31, and the figure of Leo Africanus, a sixteenth- century North African explorer and diplomat.
Projected into the twenty-sixth century however, the work is inspired by Arabic versions of the myth of Charybdis and Scylla, personified here by two female figures symbolizing two political poles. In Le nuage qui parlait (2011 – ongoing, a work specially produced for the festival), Yo-Yo Gonthier merges sculpture, drawing, video, and photography to create a work freely inspired by exploration, conquest, discoveries, physical and fantasized travel. Born from a story and a shared experience, this work carries the collective commitment of the people who built it. Its flying to different places around the world is both an action and a symbol: that of emancipation. In Les Hospitaliers (2025, a work specially produced for the festival), Eliza Levy continues the exploration of our experiences of perceiving worlds. She presents an inhabited landscape: a multisensory story-telling space that conjures forth memories of buried or forgotten worlds. The result is a marvellous adventure where time is suspended. The installation is at once the continuity and prelude to a film and theatrical creation.
The remains of Eden: from the conquest of space to tropical forests
The theme of paradise also runs through this journey. Julien Lombardi transposes Eden to outer space in Planeta (2025, a work specially produced for the festival). Inspired by the traces of the growing activity of space exploration in the Sonoran Desert (North America), now littered with technological debris, he weaves a dialogue between heaven and earth, science and the imagination. Thomas Struth and Laila Hida continue this exploration and question our fascination with exotic spaces. Thomas Struth examines the representation of paradise and captures the beauty of tropical forests and jungles around the world. He presents a monumental image, Paradise 24, Sao Francisco Xavier, Brazil, 2001 and invites the public to enter the work. Laila Hida, for her part, retraces, in Le voyage du Phoenix (2025, a work specially produced for the festival), the financial exploitation on the one hand, and the establishment of the Moroccan palm tree on the French Riviera and later in California on the other, thereby questioning notions of exoticism and leisure stemming from nineteenth-century Orientalism to the present day.
A multi-sensory, collective, and interactive experience
The festival is held in all of Jeu de Paume’s spaces. The extensive range of formats and supports, along with the narrative voice guiding the visitors, offers the public a truly immersive experience. In addition to the projections of artworks by certain artists who transform the rooms into spaces of visual and sound meditation, the festival offers a rich programme of performances, concerts, screenings, conferences, and workshops, often in direct contact with the artists themselves. Some of the highlights include the unique performances by Mounir Ayache, Laurie Bellanca, Clara Hédouin, Jeanne Alechinsky, and Violaine Lochu, but also an exceptional evening with the Disko Zakvas Kolektiv du Fotofestiwal collective, invited by Jeu de Paume to launch the opening weekend in style with a DJ set and mapping.
Throughout the festival, the experience continues over three weekends with Julie C. Fortier’s olfactory performance, Prune Phi and Céline Pham’s culinary experience, encounters with Eliza Levy and Philippe Descola, and performances by Nicolas Moulin and Vincent Moon. Workshops led by Yo-Yo Gonthier, Bérangère Cornut, and Raffard- Roussel further enrich this sensory interactive journey to the heart of contemporary art and encourage participants to question their representations of the landscape.
A book to prolong the experience
The festival publication features contributions from literary authors invited to create a story on the theme of landscape representation. The texts therefore, are fictions ranging from fairytales to youthful adventures.
This new festival is an invitation to re- appropriate the diversity of myths and realities that shape our view of nature, creating a new space for dialogue and experimentation. Through the rich programme of events and activities on offer, Jeu de Paume encourages audience participation, making the event a living evolving experience, where everyone can become an actor, in line with the founding vocation of the art centre.
Exhibition curator: Jeanne Mercier Artistic director: Loo Hui Phang w Scenography: Atelier 1-1
Graphic design: Studio PLastac
