© Eulalie Pernelet
Winners of the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award 2025
11/07/2025 – Arles
The Louis Roederer Foundation has been supporting the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles for more than seven years, and fervently shares the festival’s desire to promote photography and those involved in it. The Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award is the symbol of this shared commitment.
Once again this year, the seven shortlisted projects will be considered as a single exhibition, conceived from selection to hanging by curator César González-Aguirre.
The work of the winning artists and finalists, Octavio Aguilar, Julie Joubert, Heba Khalifa, Daniel Mebarek, Musuk Nolte, Zuzana Pustaiová and Denis Serrano, is on show at the Espace Monoprix until 5 October 2025.
© Octavio Aguilar
Octavio Aguilar, Winner of the Jury Award
Selected from among the projects of seven finalists, Octavio Aguilar, presented by Parallel Oaxaca (Mexico), won the Jury Award, which consists of a €15,000 endowment for an acquisition that will become part of the Rencontres d’Arles collection.
In her project, Tajëëw and Kontoy, the names of the ancestors of the Ayuuk people, the artist asserts the importance of indigenous Ayuuk culture in the face of globalisation, and uses her mixed language to recover the history of her ancestors. Aurea Romero, his grandmother, is the key figure who has guided him in understanding his cultural genealogy. His conversations with her and other inhabitants of his region have enabled him to reconstruct a narrative that resists the various processes of symbolic colonisation.
Octavio Aguilar uses photography as the thread running through an audiovisual installation that regenerates a memory diluted by the passage of time and the processes of cultural segregation to which indigenous groups have been subjected throughout Mexico’s history.
© Julie Joubert
Julie Joubert, Winner of the Public Award
Julie Joubert, presented by the Hôtel Fontfreyde – Centre photographique (Clermont-Ferrand, France), has been awarded the Public Award 2025, which consists of an endowment of €5,000 in the form of an acquisition.
Somewhere between fine art and documentary photography, the artist tackles issues relating to identity, youth and representations of the masculine.
Through her photographic project Patria Nostra, Julie Joubert paints a social portrait of the Foreign Legion; hyper-masculinity and fraternity are two traits that characterise a group of young people seeking French citizenship.
© Heba Khalifa
Heba Khalifa, Special Mention
The jury of the 2025 Discovery Award has decided to award a special mention to Heba Khalifa presented by Prince Claus Fund (Amsterdam, Netherlands) for her project Tiger’s eye in which she exhumes the memories of her childhood to find herself in the present in the city of Cairo. In a quest to reconcile herself with her past, she denounces the repression of religion and the family against women’s bodies.
The work of the winning artists and finalists, Octavio Aguilar, Julie Joubert, Heba Khalifa, Daniel Mebarek, Musuk Nolte, Zuzana Pustaiová and Denis Serrano, is on show at Espace Monoprix until October 5, 2025.
