Marine Hugonnier: Field Reports

The works of Marine Hugonnier (b. 1969, Paris), an acclaimed French artist and filmmaker located in London, constantly seek to alter our resources for interpreting the world.

To do so, she uses documentary and fiction strategies fluidly with one another, taking advantage of the intrinsic ambiguities of each. In her last decade’s production, direct observation of social processes encounters its counterpoint in film experiments in which the image capture traditional device—with movie, lens, and camera as irreducible elements—is faced with natural agents and phenomena and searches in them the limits of representation. In her recent work Meadow Report (2021), the artist stands at twilight in front of a pond in the Giverny Gardens, where Claude Monet created an artificial garden of exotic plants and painted his celebrated Water Lilies in the last decades of his life, while he was progressively losing his sight. Hugonnier covers these two fundamental topics—the manipulation of nature, on the one hand, and our dependence on technology to observe it, on the other—through a contemplative and silent landscape registry. Her search for a direct perception leads her to remove the camera lens at a particular moment in the film, causing an intense blue fade of all the details: a chromatic collapse. The title of the piece plays with the literal meaning of the word “meadow” and the reference to the Meadows Report, also known as The Limits to Growth (1972), one of the first documents in which the climate crisis as a result of the uncontrolled use of the planet’s resources was predicted. This central piece by Hugonnier will be accompanied by other films and photographs that, both in gallery 103 and in a screening cycle in the Museum Auditorium, will give an account of the recent practice of this artist and her unique conception of film making.