Laetitia Matrat

Artist Statement

My work explores renewal as a slow process shaped by reprises, shifts, and reinterpretations rather than clear breaks. Through collage and the assembly of archival images, I examine how landscapes, narratives, and identities evolve over time according to the perspectives through which they are seen. My projects draw on images taken from old and often abandoned publications—books and documents once destined for recycling or oblivion. These images carry the imagination of another era, reflecting historical ways of seeing the land shaped by ideology and cultural context. By cutting, fragmenting, and recomposing them, I do not attempt to restore the past but to give these materials a second life and create new narratives rooted in the present. The landscapes that emerge from these assemblages become transitional spaces composed of fragments from the world. They form composite territories that cannot be precisely located. Within them appear human figures from different times and origins: black-and-white characters from the past coexist with colored bodies suggesting arrival, movement, and the perspective of a new gaze. These presences share the same transforming space rather than opposing one another. Renewal here does not mean erasing earlier narratives but composing with them. Collage becomes a gesture of sensitive repair that gathers scattered fragments and reveals the seams, adjustments, and traces of transformation. Themes such as The Beauty of Disorder emerge from this process, exploring the forms and stories that arise from instability, chaos, and change. Other projects, such as Récit sous influence and Inhabiting the Image, reflect on the afterlife of images—documents once destined to disappear but capable of generating new meanings. Removed from their original context, they become spaces for memory, imagination, and shared storytelling, inviting viewers to slow down and reconsider their relationship with images in our contemporary visual landscape.