{"id":6146,"date":"2022-09-14T14:53:18","date_gmt":"2022-09-14T12:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chateaudeau.toulouse.fr\/agenda\/non-classe\/marion-gronier\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T11:09:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T09:09:54","slug":"marion-gronier","status":"publish","type":"onct-event","link":"https:\/\/chateaudeau.toulouse.fr\/en\/marion-gronier\/","title":{"rendered":"Marion Gronier “We were never meant to survive”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Questioning identity<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Deciphering the combination of layers comprising it, this also means questioning nature and the way we view it. Coming from France, Marion Gronier examines the situation of maimed and marginalised populations in the United States of America. They represent the \u201coriginal\u201d communities of the United States, the Indians who were massacred, the slaves of African origin, the Anabaptist immigrants who were among the first European settlers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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All of our contemporaries, who seem to be locked in a temporality that is no longer ours, they are victims but also resistance fighters. By choosing a different background for each community, she both symbolically establishes the identity of the group and builds a subtle aesthetic coherence that underlines the transition from one group to another. Marion Gronier lets these men, women and children express themselves silently solely by their presence, both fragile and intense<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christian Caujolle<\/strong>, Artistic Advisor<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n

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\"Indian
\u00a9 Marion Gronier \u00ab We were never meant to survive \u00bb Montana, 2015<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Homme
\u00a9 Marion Gronier \u00ab We were never meant to survive \u00bb Louisiane, 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Portrait
\u00a9 Marion Gronier \u00ab We were never meant to survive \u00bbPennsylvanie, 2014<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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Pr\u00e9sentation of the exhibition<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A self-taught photographer with a literary education, Marion Gronier devotes herself to personal projects in which she digs into the portrait to extract its power to act in face-to-face encounters without escape. The work “We were never meant to survive”, was awarded a grant for contemporary documentary photography by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By photographing Native Americans, Mennonites and African Americans, I sought to find the faces of the people who founded the United States of America. The faces that caught my attention seemed to be marked by sadness and bitterness that was much older than they were, as if the tidal wave of the original violence that haunts <\/strong>the history of this country, that of the extermination of the \u00abIndians\u00bb and the slavery of the \u00abBlack\u00bb, This violence was instituted in American society by a separation and hierarchisation of races, and is now systemic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I chose to re-stage this typology to overturn it, to show how, in contrast to this false assignment, the photographed face vibrates, vacillates, shimmers, the extent to which it leads us into the unknown, how elusive it is and how it defies any diminishing effect if we linger to examine it.
These faces bear <\/strong>the memory of the oppression suffered by their ancestors, but they also bear an unfailing resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marion Gronier<\/strong>, photographe<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n

\"African
\u00a9Marion Gronier\n\u00ab We were never meant to survive \u00bb\nLouisiane, 2017<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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\u201cWe have all heard the bit about what a pity it was that Plymouth Rock didn\u2019t land on the Pilgrims instead of the other way around. I have never found this remark very funny. It seems wistful and vindictive to me, containing, furthermore, a very bitter truth. The inertness of that rock meant death for the Indians, enslavement for the blacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans and who have never been able to resolve their relationship either to the continent they fled or to the continent they conquered.<\/p>James Baldwin, Nothing personal, 1964<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

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BIOGRAPHy of the artist<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

After two years of literary preparatory classes, a master’s degree in cinema and a master’s degree in cultural mediation, she discovered photography. Three years as an assistant at the VU Agency shaped her vision. She began photographing in 2003, driven by personal projects that quickly focused on faces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

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