Lauréate LBRF #9 – Marina Gadonneix

The LBRF #9 is awarded to Marina Gadonneix for her project Factories of the Social Fabric. 

Factories of the Social Fabric  investigates the infrastructure of computer systems and the social implications of artificial intelligence. The aim is to question the creation of a new social fabric through technology and our ability to comprehend it. 

The main objective of current algorithmic models is to analyze human behavior and thus to make it more predictable. The widespread use of their application in governance and commerce and their intransparent mechanisms incite fear in non-experts. This project takes up the concerns in regard to social coherence by approaching this fear rationally in order to anticipate the collateral damage of these technologies. 

Employing the principle of anticipation as a compass for her project, Marina Gadonneix will explore the aspects of uncertainty/prediction, invisibility/visibility, and fear/knowledge in human and machinic interaction. 
This project is a work of investigation and creation based on theoretical inquiry, artistic production, and collaboration with scientists and philosophers.
Between fear and desire, the project attempts to deconstruct the power of algorithms used, by man and for man, and brings us back to the question of the elusive and its attempts at appropriation and control.

Born in 1977 in Paris (FR), Marina Gadonneix is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure de la photo-graphie d’Arles. She was awarded the HSBC Prize for Photography in 2006 and the Dummy Book Award from the Fondation Luma and the Rencontres d’Arles in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions in Europe and the United States, including the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, the Kunsthalle of Tübingen, the Point du Jour at Cherbourg, the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles, the MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image at the Musée de Joliette and recently at the Centre Pompidou, as well as the Fotohof art center in Salzburg. She is represented by the Galerie Christophe Gaillard.

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Lauréate LBRF #10 – Hélène Giannecchini 

The LBRF #10 is awarded to Hélène Giannecchini for her project The Unseen.

This project starts with the encounter of Donna Gottschalk, an American photographer, and Hélène Giannecchini, a French writer and art historian. It questions the relationship between literature and photography, the possibility of political empowerment encapsulated in archives, the way in which art can testify to the social conditions of existence of the people society rejects at its margins, whether they’re queer, poor, runaways, who’s Donna Gottschalk has photographed extensively through out her life.

Donna’s work, which remained confidential for many years, is essentially composed of portraits. What makes it particularly remarkable is that she has sometimes photographed her closest people over a long time span, such as her best friend Marlene, a proud butch lesbian, her roommate Chris, her siblings: her brother Vincent, her sister Mary, a lesbian burlesque dancer and her trans sister Myla whom she photographed from her early teenage years to her passing away. Thus, she has unveiled the beauty and power of the bodies of these individuals, but also, in the background, what homophobic and patriarchal society is actually doing to these bodies. In this sense, Donna Gottschalk’s work is implicitly political.

Donna Gottschalk kept all her negatives, but hundreds of images have not been printed yet. Most of the images remain unpublished: therefore, a vast editing work needs to be done to reconstitute the series. An important part of this work will be done with the artist, Donna Gottschalk. In fact, an oral archive need to be built to understand deeply the lives she photographed, as well as their biographical details. The Lewis Baltz Research Fund will help Hélène Giannecchini to do curatorial research on the images, to analyze them and place them in the context of social and art history.  

Born in 1949 in New York (US), Donna Gottschalk is an American photographer and a lesbian activist. She grew up in New York City, in the Lower East Side. She joined the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1969. The same year she joined the Gay Liberation Front, becoming an active member of the movement. In 1970, she and other activists organised the Lavender Menace action during the National Organisation for Women congress, to protest against the exclusion of lesbians from the women’s liberation Movement. In 1971, she moved to San Francisco with her sisters Myla and Mary where she worked as a taxi driver. She then joined a photographic printing company before moving to Connecticut where she established a commercial photographic lab. In the late 1990s, she became a nursing auxiliary and moved to Vermont. In 2018, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York organised the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her work. 

Born in 1987 in Les Lilas (FR), Hélène Giannecchini is a writer and art theorician and specialises in the relationship between text and image. She holds a PhD in literature wich was about the photographer and writer Alix Cléo Roubaud, whose Fonds she has been directing for over ten years. She published Une Image peut-être vraie in 2014 and Voir de ses propres yeux in 2020. Since 2021, she has been conducting research on queer archives and memory, notably in the context of a residency at Centre national de la danse in Pantin (France). From 2021 to 2022, she was awarded a residency at Villa Albertine, with the dancer and choreographer François Chaignaud and the composer Sasha J. Blondeau, to write the booklet accompanying Cortège that will be performed at Philharmonie de Paris in June 2023.