Mickaël Vis

My project takes Walnut Grove, a small town in Minnesota made world-famous through Little House on the Prairie, as its starting point. The television series helped shape and disseminate an idealized vision of rural America: pioneering, white, family-oriented, and stable. In France, as elsewhere, this imaginary has profoundly influenced our perception of the United States. My own first name, Mickaël, inherited from the pervasive American culture of the 1980s and 1990s, offers an intimate entry point into this research. 

I wish to travel to Walnut Grove in order to confront this inherited image with the contemporary reality of the territory. Since the 2000s, the town has welcomed, in particular, a significant Hmong community, whose presence has profoundly transformed a place that is nonetheless still widely represented through its pioneer mythology. This collision between a fixed imaginary and a changing social reality lies at the heart of the project: how do new stories come to inhabit a territory saturated with representations that precede them? 

During the residency, I will develop a body of work combining documentary observation, encounters, portraits, landscapes, and archival research. I will examine both the places associated with the memory of the series—museums, landscapes, and traces of tourism—and the spaces of contemporary everyday life, while gradually building relationships with local residents, especially members of the Hmong community. Local and family archives will enter into dialogue with images and texts. 

The residency will allow me to gather the initial material for a long-term project: a body of work exploring the different layers of Walnut Grove, between fiction, collective memory, and contemporary transformations. More broadly, the project will examine what becomes of mythologies when the real territory ultimately exceeds the images that have shaped it. 

The United States occupies a particular place in my imagination, as it does for many Europeans: it is a territory we know even before having travelled through it, through cinema, television, photography, and popular culture. I wish to work within this gap between a lived territory and the representations that precede it. 

This research extends Sous le soleil devant les divins, a project developed in France around the place of the individual within collective mythologies. I am interested in the way each of us inherits narratives, symbols, and representations that exceed us, and attempts to find a place within them. In the United States, this question takes on another dimension. Whereas France often maintains an institutional and heritage-based relationship with its collective narratives, American mythologies have largely been shaped and disseminated through fiction and popular culture, eventually becoming part of European imaginaries. 

The Midwest, and Walnut Grove in particular, offers a privileged setting in which to observe this phenomenon. I wish to explore the town and its surrounding area, its agricultural landscapes and everyday spaces, as well as sites devoted to the memory of Little House on the Prairie. I also intend to consult local archives and meet historians, long-standing residents, and the different communities that make up the territory today. 

These encounters will allow me to observe how different life paths and memories inhabit, extend, or contradict a shared collective narrative, and how individuals find their place within a mythology that has not always represented them