We are honored to inaugurate the Celine Croze exhibition in the project room at the PAC in Milan at the same time as the exhibition of the great Shirin Neshat curated by Beatrice Benedetti and Diego Sileo.
SQEVNV
«Siempre Que Estemos Vivos Nos Veremos». Yari
“Life is this, a sliver of light that ends in the night.”
[Louis Fernand Celine]
Claudio Composti: I met Celine for the first time at the Rencontres d’Arles, years ago. I was immediately struck by her restless gaze on the world. I was struck by the powerful urge to tell her story. That same urgency of life of her characters, who touch each other between the sacred and the profane like damned lovers, with an insolent sensuality. Celine’s is a journey to the end of the night. An intimate vision of violence in Latin America, without compromises and without masks. SQEVNV, an acronym for “Siempre Que Estemos Vivos Nos Veremos”, is the phrase that Yari, the gang leader of the block where she lived in Caracas, told her shortly before dying.
Her images are powerful, pastel-colored, dominated by a nocturnal atmosphere, in which love and death coexist, “as if blood, death and power made people more alive”. “The awareness of her own end was something terrible and sublime” Celine recalls “the extreme violence and the absurdity of the situation gave the impression that life was just a game.
A month later, Yari was killed. He was 27 years old. “My wanderings in Latin America were crossed by other surprising encounters, in which I saw beings clinging to disorder like a furious provocation, like the scream of an adolescent amused by danger, condemned and free at the same time.” How free and damned was Yari. How free is Celine, who finds in the darkness, with her photography, that extreme thrill that fuels her animal heartbeat.
Celine Croze (Casablanca, 1982), born in Morocco and living in Paris, has a background in cinema.
Her work has been presented at the International Meetings of Photography in Fez, at the Billboard Festival in Casablanca and Istanbul, at the Biennale of Marrakech and Paraguay.
At the Kassel Festival, at the Mudima Foundation in Milan, at the Manuel Rivera Ortiz Foundation for the Rencontres de Arles 2023, at Paris Photo and at the Focale Gallery in Switzerland (2024).
In 2019 she won the In Cadaquez festival and the revelation award at the Face à la mer festival and the Map Festival with the series “SQEVNV”.
In 2020 she won the Mentor award for her future project “Mala Madre”.
In 2021 she was among the finalists of the HSBC award with “SQEVNV”.
Selected for the Springboard of young talents at the Planches Contact festival in Deauville, her series “Silence insolent” won the 2021 Audience Award.
In 2022, her book “Siempre Que”, published by Lamaindonne, won the Prix Nadar.
In 2023, her photographic film “Mala Madre” won the first prize at the Lanuu Screen Festival and the Audience Award at Nuits Photos in Paris.
