AURÉLIE SCOUARNEC
Feræ
PORTFOLIO
Aurélie Scouarnec, Feræ, courtesy the artist
Since the beginning of 2020, I regularly visit a care center for wildlife. It is a place close to the hustle and bustle of the city. It is also deployed in a less urban environment to help prepare for an animal’s return to the wild. In this place, the will is to help all species of birds and mammals without distinction.
Here, over hours which are often forgotten, gestures are repeated and become recurring rituals. Veterinarians, trainers, volunteers, and students follow one another. Their faces watch. Their hands nourish, educate, heal, and cleanse.
In contact with injured bodies, the space opens up for a face-to-face encounter with an animal ‘otherness’, where distances are recomposed and sometimes entirely removed. In the close proximity of this encounter with the wild animal, movements seek assurance and accuracy depending on the species. We learn to be attentive to the slight signs of an animal’s fear, watching the shelters, the linen sifting the light, the silence.
Aurélie Scouarnec, Feræ, courtesy the artist
This time of care, which sees the relational boundaries with the non-domestic animal jostle and change, must be as brief as possible in order to avoid fatal stress, or, on the contrary, to impregnate the animal with too much of the human presence, a term called imprinting.
At a time when wild species and their habitats continue to constantly shrink, sensitives are trying to make themselves heard and act for wildlife. An attempt to repair our links with the living.
With more than six thousand animal receptions per year, the «Faune Alfort» association, which is associated with the Alfort University Veterinary Hospital for Wildlife CHUV-FS, has become the leading care centre in France for a num- ber of wild species. It is part of the National Network of Wildlife Care Centres. While the received number of animals in distress continues to increase each year, the balance of these centres surviving thanks to donations remains extremely precarious.
Aurélie Scouarnec
AURÉLIE SCOUARNEC - BIO
Born in 1990 in Argenteuil, near Paris, Aurélie Scouarnec lives and works in Paris. A speech therapist by training and a self-taught photographer, she developed her photographic practice during workshops with Claudine Doury.
In 2021 she was a laureate of the Bourse du Talent and participated in the exhibition La Photographie à Tout Prix at the BnF in Paris. Her work has recently been shown at the festival InCadaqués and Encontros ad Imagem in Braga (2021), at Galerie l'Imagerie in Lannion (2020) and at the Festival International de Photographie de Hyères at the Villa Noailles (2018).
Aurélie Scouarnec, Feræ, courtesy the artist
Aurélie Scouarnec, Feræ, courtesy the artist
