Lea Habourdin

(work in progress)
It was in the spring of 2015 that I first set foot in the offices of MATEIS (INSA, National Institute of Applied Sciences). I had met Sophie C. a few days before and her images, made with a scanning electron microscope, opened my desire for partnership, and so I decided to go to Lyon to see more.

During the following eighteen months a multitude of researchers welcomed me, showed me and explained to me their job, my novice questions being directed towards what fascinated me: the notion of fatigue of materials. The observation of a moment as sudden and ephemeral as the fracture immediately fascinated me. I see in these researches a poetic feel invoking resistance, fracture, fault. It is also a phenomena experienced by any human being – the pressure, the notions of resistance, suppleness, fatigue – that are observable on a material like steel, moreover the scientific words used to describe these observations join the Lexical field of human emotion.

In May 2015, I launched an artistic laboratory called PROTOCOLE, which brought together a writer -Olivia Pierrugues-, the INSA researchers and myself with the same idea: showing the fault, the point of relaxation, the resistance that yields.

Born in 1985 in the north of France, Léa Habourdin first studied printmaking at Estienne in Paris and then photography in Arles. Attentive to the diversity of life forms, her practice seeks to draw other ways of resonating with Worlds. She observes the relationship we maintain with other animals, with landscapes and play with the notions of survival, fracture, reconstruction to recompose another view of what we call “the wild”.

Exploring fields such as ethology, applied science research or botanics, she works with drawings and photographies where the place of the book and printed matter is crucial.

Her work has been rewarded many times, she was notably awarded the Carte Blanche PMU – le BAL in 2015, the CIPGP research grant in 2019, and the CNAP creation grant in 2020. Her work has been shown in several festivals (Photo Phnom Penh in Cambodia, Lianzhou festival in China, Photo Saint Germain in Paris)
In 2018 she exhibited “Survivalists” at the GoEun Museum in South Korea and took advantage of the opening of the exhibition to launch her publishing house: Mille Cailloux (which she now runs with Jessica Martinato) where the act of publishing will be thought of as an artistic practice.

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