Dami x INSTANTS (2025)
Smith
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Visual artist SMITH, the third person invited to the INSTANTS residency, discovered that his maternal grandparents actually met at Château Palmer. This nudge from the past then encouraged him to delve deep into the fertile strata of the present, to look closer at the secret ramifications of the living world from vine to compost, to hone his sensitivity to phantoms and to shape his own visions through a form of trance, welcoming chimeras, tentacular tubers, incandescent bodies and complicit networks of vines.
SMITH’s new artistic cycle, Dami, an intimate, psycho-geographical investigation into connection, roots and faith, was partly born in Château Palmer’s vineyards.
Credits : All images © SMITH for the INSTANTS residency, Château Palmer and Leica, 2024
During periods of frost, I saw the men and women rush out at night to save their plots of vines and protect the plants by dint of intense physical effort. This effort, this ritual, this discipline of the body, this extrasensory communication, it’s all part of a form of devotion, openness and faith.
The mystery I am trying to unravel remains the same but I am going about it in a different way. This time, I am getting closer to plants, animals and insects; looking less for messages from the heavens and more for their earthly effects, which are reflected into the unity of living things.
At night, species merge and threads interweave underground. Energy, knowledge and life circulate.
SMITH
An artist-researcher born in 1985 in Paris, SMITH took a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne and has studied at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie d'Arles, Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains and UQAM, University of Quebec in Montreal. Disrupting genres, languages and disciplines, SMITH's works are curious, in the etymological sense of cura, evoking curiosity and care about the world around us, the terrestrial and the celestial, human and non-human, the visible and the invisible. Thermal cameras, drones, neon lights, implanted microchips, magnets and subcutaneous meteorites, atomic mutations and trance practices all feed into a fluid body of work that is made using technological and spiritual means and incorporates the dimensions of mystery, dream and the beyond.
Biography
GALERIE LEICA PARIS VILLAGE ROYAL
26 rue Boissy d’Anglas, Paris 8th
From April 3 to June 14, 2025
Monday to Saturday, from 10am to 7pm
Free admission
ARTIST’S BOOK
Dami x INSTANTS
Published by Filigranes Éditions
Available on September 2025
RETROSPECTIVE AT THE MAC VAL
Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne
Place de la Libération, Vitry-sur-Seine
Winter 2025-2026
Calendar
L’Arc sera parmi les nuages (2024)
Henrike Stahl
