Emeline Ametis

From the project 'Peyi manman' by Emeline Ametis

Biography

Website: https://emelineametis.cargo.site/

Emeline Ametis (1992) is a french-caribbean visual artist, born in Villepinte. In 2021, she went to study at l'Ecole nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, after spending some years as a journalist in various Parisian news outlets. She graduated in 2024 with a Jury's mention. Her hybrid work as an artist-archivist questions the complex relationships we can have with a rich and traumatic history, territories and multiple identities. After taking part in several group exhibitions, some of her work was selected for publication in the first edition of Macaroni magazine.

The project

"'peyi manman' (Creole for ‘motherland’) is a series of photographs about the diasporic experience. Through the use of portrait and landscape photography, I question the complex relationship I have with Guadeloupe - an archipelago that I carry only by inheritance - and with its history, itself already marked by displacement, memory and oblivion. In the Caribbean context, to ask the question of diaspora is to grasp what is maintained, but also to state what is erased and lost.

The power of nature in the West Indies summons up the territory's complex history, long before it is the attribute of a “Paradise Lost”: everywhere you look in Guadeloupe, there's the idea of memory, violence, hiding and trembling. So I took landscape samples from this territory. I played with scale to decontextualize, to lose the viewer, to pose a question: how does the imagination fill the gaps created by distance and silence?

In short, “peyi manman” is an invitation to take the measure of my own experience: Guadeloupe is an archipelago that I have experienced more in my imagination than in reality ."

From the project 'Peyi manman' by Emeline Ametis

From the project 'Peyi manman' by Emeline Ametis