Edward Burtynsky – Mounds and Voids
From Human to Global Scale

Curator : Catherine Bédard

Produced by the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, in partnership with Villa créative, Avignon

A renowned Canadian photographer, travelling around the planet for decades and exploring the residual landscapes left behind by our modern existence, Edward Burtynsky’s striking images evoke abundance and absence, the local and global issues around water and oil, the exploitation of resources and the resulting impact on labour forces and populations. The Canadian Cultural Centre exhibition proposes a new, intimate and subjective crossing of the corpuses of this colossal body of work.

Mounds and Voids. From Human to Global Scale focuses on the industrial and human means convened in the profitable exploitation of land, on the overall equilibrium of the mounds and voids created by our local imbalances, on the subterranean sections and reliefs that have nothing natural about them. Far away from the large urban centres and the everyday lives of the privileged, what imprints do the operations of digging and piling leave on our planet? What do we see and what do we know of those who dig, extract, pile up and work with bare hands where industrial machinery cannot?

Starting with an immersive and contrasting face-to-face between an industrial mining site and an artisanal mining site, both in Africa (gallery 2, on the left of the Villa’s central access), the exhibition offers a paradoxical look behind the scenes at our world, inviting us to evaluate the local and global issues of the exploitation of resources. Mounds and Voids. From Human to Global Scale is also a reflection on the construction of the image and its own power, in the very singular form of the mastery of the representation of space and of the scale of things, as well as on the assumed exploitation of technology in the service of an exploring gaze thwarting and defying the limits of perception.

The exhibition brings together, in three parts occupying the entire left wing of the Villa, a condensed selection of fourteen photographs showing, in relief and in depth – in all the dimensions of these terms (formal, geological, social, economic, political) -, the exploitation of soil and the recycling of our waste; two monumental works produced in Johannesburg and Madagascar from Edward Burtynsky’s most current project, Africa; and an ensemble of augmented reality experiences constituting a meditation on the memory of industrial relics.

More information : Villa Créative – Avignon Université