Isadora Romero © Ana María Buitrón
Isadora Romero, winner of the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award 2023 at the Rencontres d’Arles
17/07/2023 – Arles, Provence
Involved for more than six years in the Rencontres d’Arles, the Louis Roederer Foundation fervently shares the festival’s desire to defend photography and and its emerging actors through the Discovery Award.
Isadora Romero © Ana María Buitrón
The jury of the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award 2023 has rewarded the Ecuadorian artist Isadora Romero presented by Magnum Foundation (United States). In her work “Fume, Root, Seed” [Humo, Semilla, Raíz] she explores her link to agrobiodiversity after discovering that her ancestors were seed guardians. This project offers an alternate way of looking at environmental issues through the prism of possibility, instead of catastrophic consequence. Audrey Bazin, Artistic Director of the Louis Roederer Foundation, underlines that ” this Jury Prize recognizes both her sensitive photographic work and her determined commitment, convincing us of the need for artists to look at the world in order to change it for the better.”
© Isadora Romero
Soumya Sankar Bose presented by Experimenter (Kolkata, India) has been granted the 2023 Public’s Award, for his project “A Discreet Exit through the Darkness” in which he examines memory and its shifting nature by attempting to piece together the incident linked to the disappearance of his mother in 1969. Audrey Bazin points out that the “Public’s Award has a special resonance this year, as the curator Tanvi Mishra places the public at the heart of her curatorial scheme, based on the premise that the reading of photographic images is conditioned by our individual memory.”
© Isadora Romero
The Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award associates all exhibition spaces. Through their work spotting new talent, galleries, art centres, community spaces, independent venues and institutions are often the first to support emerging artists. These structures can submit a project by an artist whose work deserves to be discovered by an international audience.
The ten selected projects for the 2023 edition are considered as a collective exhibition, conceived, from the selection to the hanging, in an innovative and sustainable way by the curator Tanvi Mishra. Rather than fit a theme, the works presented are united through a proposition that the evolving relationship between the spectator and the image is constantly shaped by personal memory as well as the apparatus of viewing. How we see is a function of our individual condition. By harnessing the inherent ambiguity of the image, they present us with alternative visions of what surrounds us, while also nudging us to interrogate our expectations of the photograph itself.
The finalists works will be presented until 27 August 2023 in the Eglise des Frères Prêcheurs in Arles, France.
