How to photograph invisible pollution? How to report on toxicity present in the air, soil and rivers that we can’t even perceive? Such is the wager embraced by Coline Jourdan for her Soulever la poussière [Raising the Dust] project. For the past three years, the photographer has been documenting the area around Salsigne, the former gold and arsenic mine, located in the Orbiel Valley in the Aude department. This mine, which flourished in the last century and closed at the beginning of the following one, in 2004, leaving behind waste that is now strewn and concealed across the landscape.

To better detect the clues to this complex reality and catastrophe foretold, the artist deploys various approaches to the territory, borrowing from different registers (documentary, experimental and scientific photography, archives...). She photographs the gestures and tools of the scientists she accompanies on sampling trips. Against a black background, she captures arsenic rocks that look ready to join the collections of a natural history museum. She develops certain images with water from neighboring rivers, as if better to reveal these invisible after-effects. For the Discovery Award, the project is expanded with a new segment comprising portraits, still lives and landscapes. The artist becomes the custodian of numerous accounts of those who have had to reconsider their way of inhabiting the territory, and for whom the garden and, more broadly, the outside world, have unwittingly become a threat.