Born in 1974, Amélie Labourdette live and work in Paris.
Visual artist, photographer, Amélie Labourdette obtained her degree in Fine Art from the National Fine Art School of Nantes (Les Beaux-Arts). Recipient of numerous research and production grants, her work has been shown in several exhibitions in France and abroad (United Kingdom, China, Georgia, Italy, Germany), and is included in public or private collections. Since 2015, she has been carrying out artistic residencies in Southern Italy, Tunisia and the United States, which allow her to develop her projects.
In 2016, Amelie won the Sony World Photography Awards in the category Architecture, with the photographic series Empire of Dust. Then in 2017, she is awarded a grant to support contemporary documentary photography by the CNAP for her project Traces of a human occupation carried out in the Gafsa phosphate mining basin, at the gateway to the Tunisian desert. From 2017 to 2019 she conducted the KÓSMOS - Plurality of Worlds project as an Aby Warburguienne library in the United States in the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, South Utah and South Colorado, during two visits: in February 2017 with a Sony scholarship and in March 2018, following the invitation in residence in Marfa (Texas) from the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes / Saint-Nazaire. In 2020, KÓSMOS is selected as one of the 10 finalists for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2020.
She is represented by Thierry Bigaignon Gallery, Paris, France.
Amélie Labourdette’s work, mainly related to the photographic medium, unfolds through the exploration of minor narratives and the revision of dominant historical narratives. Her work does not simply seek to reproduce the image of the world externally, to document it, but explores the primordial strangeness of our terrestrial «environment» perceived as an encrypted world, in order to reveal its mesh, its inter-connectivities and its interrelationships. Her research on interdependence is based on a Warburgian methodology. Proceeding not by analogical association of representations and by intuition, Amélie Labourdette brings together the links of meaning and form. Each project is first and foremost an investigation and invites us to create space-time knotting. These intertwine between the fictional and referential past, the lived present and the potential future, trying to build an alternative historicity regime.
Constellations of photographic images, each project approaches the question of the complex relationship between humans and their «environment», the terrestrial biosphere, the cosmos, through a perspectivist reading of the territory, singular sites and the capture of index traces, combining anthropological and historical analysis with the subjective poetry of the image. The hierarchy of knowledge of the subject is abolished in the project of an analogue inclusive synthesis by comparing different cosmovisions, different temporal strata.