Aya
Yann Gross and Arguiñe Escandón created their Aya project (which means ‘spirit’ in Quechua) based on the work of Charles Kroehle, a 19th-century French-German pioneer in ethnographic photography. According to popular legend, he supposedly disappeared in the Peruvian Amazon. The Aya series uses both historical and contemporary images, and was created in the heart of the rainforest, to propose a dialogue between the representation of exoticism and the artists’ sensory impressions from time spent with various indigenous communities. To infuse their photographs with the real essence of the jungle, Yann Gross and Arguiñe Escandón printed some of them on the spot, benefitting from the photosensitive properties of exotic plants. Their spring 2020 residency at La Becque enabled them to further their research in plant-based photographic development using extracts from local plants.
