Léo Derivot

Photography allows me to escape through creation, but also, through the encounters it generates, to change the way I look at my environment, to take a step back from the strangeness of our society. Two major axes then emerge: that of creation and that of transmission. I use photography as a borderless language. On the one hand, I build, over the years, an iconographic corpus that questions the possibility of realizing our individual and collective utopias, but I do not forbid myself any abstract digression free from any constraint. My avowed goal, my ideal, is to compose, thanks to the chromatic and aesthetic power of my shots, spaces for deceleration and reflection.

By engaging in dialogue with various audiences that I initiate, I invest the social and political field, I question our relationship to images, to the living and to others. I choose, more particularly, to meet marginalized audiences, in order to co-create spaces for projection, questioning, and dreaming. I then try, on many occasions, to instill, in gazes and minds unfortunately too often lacking, a glimmer of hope. This pedagogical and playful transmission allows me to confront audiences with the impact of the multiplication of images on the construction of our social imagination. By working more intimately on issues related to their identities and their dreams, I highlight the difficulty for each person to represent themselves graphically and textually, and I encourage them to overcome their fears and to 'offer', to 'give themselves' to the World.