Sporobole and Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie, in collaboration with Loto-Québec, announce the selection of Pépite & Josèphe (Sutton and Montreal, Québec) to carry out a photographic mission that will document the landscape of the Eastern Townships in 2023-2024. The duo is made up of Vincent Biron-Chalifour and Josèphe Landreville, and the results of their research will be presented at Sporobole in 2024 and then at Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie in 2025.
With the project Les créatures de la route en Estrie (Creatures of the Road in the Eastern Townships), Pépite & Josèphe present the construction of a uchronic narrative (reconstructing history in a fictive way) of the road, engaging in dialogue with artificial-intelligence technologies. The duo intends addressing the notions of landscape and territory by way of car parts found by the roadside on a pilgrimage linking Sutton, the setting of their studio, and Sherbrooke, the site of the Sporobole artist center.
In a more detailed way, the two artists describe their project like this: “On our daily walks, we find fragments of rusted vehicles by the side of the road. The shape of these artefacts, which carry stories with them, is especially attractive to us. Since 2016 we’ve been collecting these remains that connect us with the experience of walking, a mode of getting around that we favor in both cities and outlying areas. Walking, a natural and innate movement, encourages us to slow down and cultivate that marvelous capacity for wonder at what surrounds us.”
The project Les créatures de la route en Estrie will thus feature fossils of creatures invented by artificial intelligence, which the duo will re-create based on car parts. “After we collect this abandoned waste, our aim is to explore different assembly and printing techniques (digital printing, photomontage, 3D animation, photogram, engraving…) in the hope of rehabilitating these parts by endowing them with new meanings, new shapes, new stories.”
Pépite & Josèphe hope to turn this photo assignment into “a body of original, accessible and intriguing photographic works.” They plan to produce a series of five photomontages and five assemblies of rusted-metal parts, which corresponds to one creature per day of walking.
About Pépite & Josèphe
Born in 1994, Vincent Biron-Chalifour holds a bachelor’s degree in photography from Concordia University (2018). Josèphe Landreville, born in 1993, has a master’s from Université du Québec à Montréal in visual and media arts (2021). Dividing their life between Montreal and Sutton, they presented their first individual exhibit, Phase 5: les gallons-panorama, at the artist center Atelier Circulaire in Montreal in 2020. In 2022 the duo received the Exploration and Research grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. They have taken part in a several group exhibitions since 2017, notably Migrations, happening now and into 2024 at the Biosphère museum in Montreal. The duo has also done two creation residencies in Montreal, at Galerie B-312 (2023) and at Espace Limina (2022), and two others in Québec City: at La Bande Vidéo (2022) and at Engramme (2018). Pépite & Josèphe have also produced close to a dozen des tableaux sur mesure, qu’il nomme des tableaux-extension, for individuals and for living spaces.
Top image : Gigathutrakhelos, photomontage in collaboration with artificial intelligence Stable Diffusion, digital image, Pépite & Josèphe, 2023
Bottom image : Portrait of Pépite & Josèphe (Vincent Biron-Chalifour and Josèphe Landreville)