BREACHES

Breach, n. — An opening, whether deliberate or accidental, in a wall, a rampart or a continuous surface. By extension: a moment when something unexpected seeps in, when an established certainty cracks open to make room for another way of seeing. It is these breaches, carved into the architecture of everyday life, that this monumental photographic exhibition opens up across the La Défense district.

THE ARTISTS AND THEIR WORKS:

• Marine Lanier – Les Vagues

On the façade of Notre-Dame-de-Pentecôte church and the windows of the Paris La Défense Information Point, Marine Lanier brings a liquid presence into the heart of the urban landscape. Taken from her Les Vagues series, these monumental photographs capture the swirling movements of a watercourse, transforming them into abstract landscapes suspended between reality and imagination. Drawing both on personal memories and the world of Virginia Woolf, the artist explores the connections between aquatic environments and our inner landscapes. Through these shifting, immersive images, she invites the eye to wander, allowing the power and mystery of the living world to emerge at the heart of the city.

Marine Lanier develops a photographic practice in which narrative, memory and imagination intertwine. Winner of the Maison Ruinart Prize associated with Paris Photo 2025, she lives and works between Dieulefit and Paris.

What if slowing down could become an act of resistance? With Pasithée, named after the Greek goddess of rest, Elsa Leydier brings photographs of plants and peaceful faces into the urban space, inviting a moment of pause amid the relentless pace of Paris La Défense. Created using the film soup technique, her analogue photographs are transformed through infusions of plants known for their soothing properties, such as chamomile, passionflower and valerian. These interventions alter the very materiality of the photograph, creating images with shifted colours and fluid textures, in which plants become active participants in the creative process. Through these works, the artist opens a sensitive pause within the urban landscape, inviting us to reconnect with another sense of time: the slow and discreet rhythm of the living world.

Elsa Leydier lives and works between France and Brazil. Her photographic practice explores our relationship with nature and the ways in which images shape our perception of the world. Winner of the Maison Ruinart Prize and the Dior Prize for Young Photography in 2019, she has developed a distinctive, colourful visual language shaped by her travels throughout South America.

• Julien Lombardi – Planeta

Through a double installation drawn from his Planeta series, Julien Lombardi invites us to explore the geological depths hidden beneath our feet. Echoing the verticality of Paris La Défense, his works take us on a journey through desert landscapes, rock formations and invisible worlds. The artist brings into dialogue a panorama of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico with images inspired by petrography, a scientific technique used to observe the intimate structure of rocks. Created in collaboration with astrophysicists, biologists and geologists, these photographs blur the boundaries between science and imagination, between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. By revealing traces of deep time inscribed in matter, Planeta reminds us that beneath the city lies a much older history: that of the Earth, its transformations and the living world.

Julien Lombardi lives and works between France and Mexico. At the intersection of photography, anthropology and science, he develops long-term research projects that question our relationship with territories and the ways in which the world is represented. He is the recipient of the 2024 Photography & Science Prize.

• SMITH – Dami