Clément Verger
Photographer
July-August 2024
- Visual Arts
“It is these particular stretches of time between destinations that I hope to inhabit during this Atlantic-Pacific Artists Line residency, as I combine my photography with writing, drawing, and crafting within a folk art tradition.”
Clément Verger is a French artist-researcher whose work questions the apparently natural character of the landscapes surrounding us in the era of the Anthropocene, blending together artistic production and scientific protocol following a research-based approach. His projects are conceived of as tools for analyzing the complex ramifications of humans’ influence on their environment.
Launched in 2016, Circumnavigations is a long-term, three-part series of works that focuses on the way the voyages of Captain James Cook have influenced the global landscape. The project takes each of Cook’s three expeditions as a case study on the transport and implantation of plant species around the world.
After studying visual communication at the School of Applied Arts (ENSAAMA – Olivier de Serres), Clément Verger became a recipient of a Leonardo da Vinci international scholarship. In 2011, he completed his master’s in photographic studies from the University of Westminster, London. He was awarded a prize at the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris in 2018. That same year, he also received a creation grant from the French National Center for Visual Arts (CNAP). Verger was a member of the Académie de France à Madrid at the Casa de Velázquez for its 2018–19 season. In 2020, he received the Florence and Damien Bachelot Collection Photographic Print Prize, awarded by the International College of Photography of Greater Paris (CIPGP). The following year, he again received support from CNAP for his Circumnavigations project. His work has been shown in multiple private collections, as well as in the collections of the Casa de Velázquez, FRAC Picardie, FRAC Sud, the BnF, the Bachelot Collection, CIPGP, and CNAP.
In 2021, he had the honor of becoming the first person to complete a project-led PhD at Casa de Velázquez. His Circumnavigations project will be developed over the next two years in association with Paris-Saclay University and the Cultural History Laboratory at the Center for Cultural History of Contemporary Societies (CHCSC).
This project will be incorporated into Circumnavigations, a three-part series of works that began in 2016 and focuses on the way the voyages of Captain James Cook have influenced the global landscape, viewing his three expeditions as case studies on the transport and implantation of plant species around the world. . Circumnavigations has taken me in the past few years to the eucalyptus plantations of Portugal and Galicia, to the east coast of Australia, to Norfolk Island, and to Tasmania and Bruny Island. However, none of these journeys was made by sea. The Atlantic-Pacific Artists Line residency program offers the unique opportunity of an ocean voyage, as well as the experience of the on-board stints between destinations, which I so often encounter in my reading and research.
It is these particular stretches of time that I hope to inhabit during this Atlantic-Pacific Artists Line residency, as I combine my photography with writing, drawing and crafting within a folk art tradition. There is one particular object/plant, which I have studied for several years, that appears to link the peoples and territories existing in this region of the globe—the gourd. This world-plant now serves as medium for a kind of modern scrimshaw, no longer depicting scenes of whaling, but instead those of maritime transport and seafaring life in the 21st century.
My interest in this residency focuses specifically on the Pacific portion of the voyage, going from Papeete to Savannah by way of New Caledonia, the Australian east coast, New Zealand, and the Panama Canal.
Following a modern iteration of the route once established by James Cook will be a unique opportunity, concluding the final phase of a project that I have pursued for the past eight years.
By taking advantage of the time spent between ports of call, I will be able to bridge a missing link in Circumnavigations. The experience will tie together the research that I have undertaken in these territories, the cultures that populate them, and the plants that sustain them.