JULIETTE AGNEL ジュリエット・アニェル

Juliette Agnel uses her camera to make the invisible visible, capturing what she calls “the vibration of the world”. Her interests are deeply shaped by her journey to the Dogon country in Mali when she was in her early 20s. It was a formative experience that reshaped her understanding of humanity’s place within the cosmos. Immersing herself in animist philosophies, she encountered a worldview in which nature is alive with forces beyond human sight.

In this exhibition, Agnel presents two colour series created in collaboration with Van Cleef & Arpels: Dahomey Spirit, and Susceptibility of Rocks, alongside a new, previously unseen work Eternity. In the former, she moves through the Essay Garden of the Zinsou Foundation in Benin at night, letting smoke and coloured light conjure the invisible life of ancient plants. In the latter, she turns a scientific vocabulary inward, photographing specimens from the Sorbonne’s mineral collection as though they were human portraits. Agnel also presents Eternity, a black-and-white Super 8 film made in the sacred forest of Yakushima, where she surrendered to the silence of moss.

These three works share a common grammar. Each asks us to let go of our habitual senses – to let the very small become vast, and the still become alive.“ My work is rooted in the relationship between the real and the invisible, an absolute that surpasses us and urges us to question the foundations of our humanity,” she says. “I tirelessly pursue the same quest: observing the forces that surround us but remain unseen, to grasp what unites us in depth and to remember that the small human body is a meaningful fragment of the cosmos.”