La terre amoureuse (said of soil that sticks to the boots)

La terre amoureuse (said of soil that sticks to the boots)

In March 2023, Rebekka Deubner travelled to Sainte-Soline in the Deux-Sèvres region, to take part in the demonstrations against mega-reservoirs. The repression was immediate and violent and the event was quickly reduced to spectacular images and simplistic accounts. Yet what was erased seemed essential to her. It is towards this space, outside the frame, that she chose to return, almost every month, between April 2023 and December 2025.

Travelling from north to south across the area throughout the seasons, she shares the daily lives of those who live and work on these lands. Amandine, Martial, Valentin, Rémi, Benoit and Jean-Jacques—farmers, market gardeners and environmental activists—introduce her to their practices, which follow the rhythm of mundane, repetitive tasks: fencing, irrigating, weeding, sowing, harvesting, observing and feeding. These are all actions that anchor the body in time and shift the gaze, contrary to traditional picturesque images.

Gradually, another geography emerges, consisting of cultivated plots, greenhouses, hedges and ponds, stretching from the outskirts of the Sainte-Soline basin to the dry banks of the Mignon. Water, both present and absent, forms the common thread running through this ensemble, conceived as a long, continuous movement. It flows, runs out, stagnates, then vanishes. A vital resource and a political issue, water weaves through the images without ever settling, as if resisting any attempt at simplification.

As close as possible to the earth and the transformations that forge it, Rebekka Deubner embeds the image within a shared experience. It doesn't precede the relationship: it arises from it. Rather than explaining or convincing, this work focuses on what resists demonstration: long temporalities, repetitions, the forms of attention that make engagement possible. The image is no longer the centre, but one of the effects.

Text / Julie Herault

ARTIST: Rebekka Deubner

Born in 1989 in Munich, Germany.

Lives and works in Bagnolet, France.

Photography forms the core of Rebekka Deubner's practice, combining with other media to create engaging and sensitive spaces. Her work could well be said to lie somewhere between the organic nature of metamorphosis and the unconscious that causes everything to convulse. Whether she roams the deserted beaches of Fukushima, the skin of her friends and lovers, the connections between the mind and its environment, the rage of those who cherish the earth and rise up, or the places and objects where absence is felt everywhere like a presence, the symptoms she gathers often present themselves as small catastrophes to be collected.