Bio

Born in Normandy, near Cherbourg, Agnès Villette is an artist with a practice based in photography, a freelance journalist and an educator. After a Master in Literature, in 1993, she moved to Scotland then London. In 2007, she gained an Agrégation in Modern Literature at the Sorbonne, in Paris and in 2017 a Master in Art Photography at London College of Communication, London. She is a freelance photo journalist who collaborates regularly with Dust, Citizen K, Wedemain, Le Temps, le M du Monde. Her articles and features investigate digital societies, environmental issues, eco politics and popular culture. She has taught literature and culture at several institutions such as Glasgow University, Queen Mary College and Lycée Français de Londres. Some of her photographic work and installations have been exhibited at Caen Art School and Detroit Science Lab.

Statement

Agnès is a photographer whose practice is research-based and multi-disciplinary. She explores photography, texts and film to create installations that reflect upon ecological and political issues. Influenced by the theoretical writing generated by the Anthropocene, she develops projects that merge art and science.
In Haunted, which she developed for her Master degree, she questioned our paradoxical relation with the nuclear industry, our energy dependency and the unresolved politics of nuclear waste. The project is rooted in the Cotentin peninsula in France, which uniquely features every stage of the nuclear industrial cycle, from production, to refuelling, to waste repository. Using collected Geiger counter data, cartography, uranium glass, sound and images, she invited the viewer into a direct encounter with radioactivity. Haunted is developed as a practice based PhD at Winchester School of Art, Britain, exploring the Radioactive ruins of the Norman peninsula, through the memory of rivers.

She is also currently developing 4 projects:

Beta Bunker investigates the current transformation of Sweden Cold War military bunkers into data centres.

Alien of the Species, photographic series, explore 12 invasive insects recently arrived in Europe. Confronting interviews of entomologists and environmental humanities theorists, the project maps the complex entanglement of human / animal relationships within disrupted ecosystems subjected to global warming and mass migrations.

Lithium Kids explore lithium mining in the Atacama desert, in Chile, in perspective with our digital technologies’ dependency. She is underlying how our green transition is relying on mineral trade and rare ore.

Finally, the non fiction narrative Landemer investigates an unsolved murder which happened at the heart of the Cold War, in 1969, in La Hague. Structured around the cold case’s forensic and archive research and framed by the codified style of noir literature, Agnès interviews witnesses and photographs places and evidence to reconstruct a multilayered story connecting nuclear plants, photography and the geo-politics of the era.