Born in Le Port in 1981, Yasmine Attoumane is a visual artist who works in several media (photography, video, performance, installation). She lives and works alongside the Rivière des galets, a field of practice that irrigates her first artistic projects and sets the stage for her research into the question of belonging to a territory and the drawing of its borders.
Through in situ experiments in unstable and fluctuating natural sites – the shoreline or the riverbed –, she attempts to appropriate a territory, setting the limits through various markings (lines, squares) or ephemeral installations. In 2012, she created the mural installation of photographic portraits La Rivière des galets à ciel ouvert (The Rivière des galets in the open air), the result of numerous encounters and the reestablishment of links with the inhabitants of her village after a period of absence.
Yasmine Attoumane studied in mainland France before returning to complete her study in the Reunion Island where she obtained her DNSEP in 2017. Since 2018, she has focused her work on the observation of the landscape in some areas of the Indian Ocean such as Madagascar or Mayotte. She also develops projects on the notion of empathy around immigration.
What strikes you when you are here, on the island of Reunion, are its natural landscapes: volcanoes, mountains, cirques, rivers, gullies, coasts that are intensively and perpetually eroded. These changes of the earth or these renewals of the landscape are seductive. They naturally led me to engage my research on the theme of territory. The term touches on several domains (the geographical territory and by resonance introduces other notions: the border, the interior/exterior, the passage...).
These landscapes touched me and marked my first plastic productions. The management of territories is a preoccupation of mine on a domestic scale as well as on a global scale.
Through my plastic productions, I carry out experiments in situ on living and moving spaces such as the shoreline or the riverbed. I try to appropriate a territory by using various techniques (photography, installation, video, performance, ceramics...) and plastic operations such as the delimitation by the line, the grid, the architectural installation to propose a new representation of it.
My approach is in line with the practice of Land art and environmental art. The question of belonging to a territory, the border, the positioning and the encounter with these precarious territories have become artistic, political and social questions. The territories I have chosen are precarious, of an unstable duration. I am in the vain attempt to conquer these places.
– Yasmine Attoumane