PARIS.- Against the backdrop of the Gulf of Guinea, and in collaboration with local artists, photographer Nuits Balnéaires stages images that explore the relationship between his forebears’ experience of exile and his own perspective on travel and deracination. The Ivorian photographer pursues a profoundly introspective, transgenerational approach as he seeks to lay bare the unseen threads that connect past and present, our identities, and our genetic, cultural and historical heritage.

Nuits Balnéaire’s photographic series “Eboro” draws on the world of fairy tales to invite profound reflection on the human condition through a dense, contemplative narrative suffused with melancholy and nostalgia, akin to saudade. Eboro refers to humanity’s place of origin, in the metaphysical thought of the Nzima and Agni-Bona peoples, based mostly in Côte d’Ivoire. At the end of our life on Earth, the human soul – the immaterial essence of our being — returns to Eboro, to our ancestors, to whom the deceased must give an account of their earthly existence.

To make the photographs in the series, Nuits Balnéaires received a grant of €40,000 through the Latitudes programme, after being selected by a jury of representatives from the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and its partner institutions, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the International Center of Photography (ICP). The second edition of Latitudes is mentored by the ICP’s artistic director David Campany.

Nuits Balnéaires’s series “Eboro” will be shown at the ICP in New York from January 29 to May 4, 2026, alongside François-Xavier Gbré’s series “Radio Ballast”, laureate of the first edition of Latitudes. The show will subsequently move to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris from May 20 to October 4, 2026, and in Abidjan in 2027. The project will also be presented in a bilingual French-English volume, co-published by Atelier EXB and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

Since its establishment, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has been an active supporter of the visual arts, and photography in particular, through a range of programmes. Latitudes succeeds Immersion (2014-2024), which was designed to raise the profile of international creative photography in association with the Foundation’s long-standing partners, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris) and the International Center of Photography (New York). Côte d’Ivoire is the first honouree, for a two-year period. Nuits Balnéaires is the programme’s second laureate, following François-Xavier Gbré in 2024.

from the Ivorian arts scene. It will also be featured in a monograph co-published by the Atelier EXB and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.