Anne-Lise Seusse
This project was born from the invitation of Amélie Nicolas, sociologist and researcher of the Ecole d’architecture de Nantes and the CRENEAU research laboratory, bringing together researchers from different backgrounds (sociologists, urban planners, architects, geographers, engineers, etc.), around the question of the becoming of the old holiday colonies on the Vendée coast. This research, conducted within the laboratory, is interested in the declassification of these spaces by political and societal choices.
I went with them to St Hilaire de Riez, a small town that had experienced a massive influx of Parisian red suburban holiday colonies out of the Second World War.
Because of this story, it is today an intense seaside resort in the summer. This invitation allowed me to continue my research on the moving peripheries and spaces in the declassification of the metropolis and to address the question of the scale and limits of a territory, that of the “Grand Paris”.
Here, it is all the more interesting that the shift of scale lies on a territory that is a forest, patri- monk of the NFB, and which contains in it a kind of micro-cosme in ruin of the peripheral cities near Paris. For two years, I have devoted myself to recording the slow degradation of one of its colonies, that of the city of Houilles abandoned in 2018. It seemed to me a suitable ground to connect several stories, that of a memory of the buildings, a history of education by the open air today passed and a wild reappropriation of this building by illegal night activities (urbex, graffiti etc...).
The idea of this work was to produce a sort of “futurology” from a field survey mixing very diverse sources of images and articulating research documents, personal archives and images produced going to a “sciencefictional” form. The construction of this fragmentary narrative from the "unexpected" superimposes a catastrophe on another; that of the submersion of the shoreline.
Speaking like the various groups and characters encountered on the site I went there mainly at night, to record the traces of these recent occupations but also the slow degradation of objects left to abandon. I realized a kind of fragmentary movement like a dissection on the abandoned objects of children who are like bodies and activities to be reconstructed.
I proposed this space as a kind of studio working on lighting as to make up these "crime" scenes. The displacement in this space between the games room, the classrooms, the hallway of the rooms and the laundry is almost at the ground level in a chromatic search on the effects of artificial lighting. The colors are saturated like the colors of the graff on the walls and LED lighting reminds the effects of some urban lighting. The breaks are sometimes very long the chrome of the silver coil has sometimes derived offering a kind of visual hallucination of the site in “suffrance”.
The colony was completely destroyed at the beginning of 2025 and the land handed over to the NFB in the state.
Trees will be replanted, breaking all traces of this story and memory.
Finally, this series allows me to mention artistic and literary figures. The two "vandalism" and "zuma" series by John Divola are particularly interested in their approach to performing intervention on the spaces but also in the tension of the relationship between document and picturality, which is at the heart of my practice.
This very « fictional» series through this description of a collective and island space also allows me to summon a certain literature of «genre anticipation», like that of J.G. Balard and Antoine Volodine.
This work continues with a production residence this year with the preparatory school of art of Issy les Moulineaux thanks to the help of the DRAC island of France that allows me to stage and recite the various components of the project; archives, texts and images.
This work was supported by CNAP in documentary photography and DRAC Island-de-France.
Anne-Lise Seusse produces photographic and video work on the issue of the territory. She is particularly interested in the micro-phenomen of ritualization of certain spaces, most often on the outskirts of large urban centres, through the practice of leisure activities. The creation of these singular communities – a group of retired people practicing the ball trap, free riders descending a militarized zone, participants in the large-scale role game generates situations that sometimes go against the political organization of these sites. Before (re)containing drafts of fiction, the artist tries to adopt a position of exteriority that is not without recalling an anthropological approach (slow approach to the field, taking notes, sketches of the implantation of the groups...), documenting these places with stories and realizing portraits of the protagonists who occupy them: his work of reporting works in these areas of glide and confrontation.
In addition to studies in philosophy, Anne-Lise Seusse is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. She teaches the image as a conference manager at ENSA Paris Malaquais.
His works were broadcast, among others, at the Creux de l’enfer in Thiers (2008), at the Ile-de-France Photographic Centre in Pontault-Combault (2010), at the Institut D’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne (2011), at La National Gallery de Cape Town (2012), at the Palais de Tokyo (2012), at the Centre Photographique de Lectoure (2013), at the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de Vass She participated in the collective exhibition "new memory" invited by Anne Bonnin in 2023 at the Grand Café in St Nazaire.
She works on a long-term project in South Africa with the support of Fnagp. Several of his photographs and videos belong to FRAC Limousin.
She made the photographic order of the eyes of the Grand Paris with the CNAP and the workshops Medici which was exhibited with these institutions in 2022 at the general stores.
It was invited in 2021 by the Holi-D research project with the ENSA of Nantes and the Espaces et Sociétés laboratory to produce a series of images around the disappearance and re-qualification of the spaces of the holiday colonies on the coast of Vendée. This research work was supported by CNAP in 2022.
An excerpt from this series entitled "Children of the Palace under the Sea" was presented by the MEP studio in 2024. This work extends in 2025 around the question of the archival.