“Le Monde sur la peau” (The World on the Skin) explores the imprint left by the world within us. It reflects on the relationship between human beings and the living world: fragile and tenacious at once.

Since the Romantic period, the landscape has served as a projection of inner emotions onto nature. One might say that human beings anthropomorphise the living world. Here, the relationship is reversed. It is the world that settles onto the skin and consciousness of these individuals, like an invisible layer guiding their life choices.

Human beings identify with their surroundings and shape themselves in relation to the landscapes they make their own. Something of the landscape has detached itself and entered the being of someone who is now entirely inhabited by it, retaining its imprint deep within their consciousness and on their skin. I therefore set out to meet people who have a particular relationship with the living world: people “borrowed” by a wild place that has left its mark on them. A place that has shaped their individuality, erased the problematic divide between the human and the non-human, and strengthened their determination to make this reciprocity between all living beings recognised.

This place has become a mental landscape: neither real nor imaginary. A condensation of all these landscapes then takes shape, as in a dream, binding the lives of these individuals to those of non-human beings. Photographs of landscapes are placed alongside photographic portraits: portraits of trees and human beings, like alter egos.

This body of work is a collection of testimonies from people whose private and professional lives are driven by the need to remain in contact with the living world. It brings together ways of “doing with” the living world that do not involve exploiting it. These are generous practices that foster a relationship between human activities and ecosystems.