Through the Eyes of Agnès Varda

In an interview from 1977, filmmaker and visual artist Agnès Varda (1928–2019) links “ the Turmoil and Charms of Decolonization "to feminist struggles for emancipation, articulating an intersectional approach long before the term was coined." 

Focusing on the artist’s photographic work as its primary source, this project is a study of Agnès Varda’s visual output, which echoes the feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist currents asserted on both individual and collective levels. Interwoven with the artist’s own statements, works, and writings, as well as with other visual and textual archives of emancipatory struggles (the Musée du Quai Branly, La Contemporaine, Cinémathèque…), the study of this previously unpublished photographic corpus, held at the Institut pour la photographie, may uncover visual and conceptual points of convergence conducive to the potential emergence of an “Aesthesis of Emancipation.” 

Thinking about these “ charming messes "As a common thread throughout this body of work, it may reveal connections with other filmmakers, photographers, and international activists who, from Algiers to Paris and from the United States to Cuba, have offered a different perspective—if not collectively engaged in a process of deconstruction and resistance—through the image. 

Agnès Varda’s photographs will thus be juxtaposed with images that offer alternative imaginaries in response to a certain latent visuality, shaped by diverse forms of political domination.