Your name
Frédérique Gélinas
Place of birth
Quebec, Canada
Place where you live now
Turin, Italy
3 words to describe you
as the glass (fragile, resistant, transparent)
Why do you take pictures?
It allows me to embrace nostalgia. Photography holds a strong sense of the past that intrigues me because it makes life so meaningful. Flirting with time appears to be the best way for me to play with the world, to question it and to explore its magical, dreamlike dimension.
Where do you get your inspiration?
From intuitive visions and dreams, from spontaneous moments and souvenirs. I can be inspired by a stranger's expression that evokes a story, by coincidences and irrational sensations. By books, movies, music, spaces and other peoples’ works. I also get a lot of inspiration from plants, from contact with the ground and the sea.
Who are your influences?
Leonard Cohen as a spiritual guide. Surrealist and metaphysic painters, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Éluard, Francesca Woodman, Carlos Reygadas. Cristina de Middel who translates conceptual into tangible in her photography has been an influence lately. My father for his kindness, my mother for her craziness, two important characteristics of a photo-documentarist, I think.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Influenced by my architecture background, I am interested in the formation of unique spaces, in the way the human settles himself among fragile territories and realities, in the contrasted imaginaries of natural and built environments. My photography is orientated towards sensible human interactions, socio-cultural issues and authenticity.
What impact would you like your art to have?
Because of the themes I explore, I hope my work can lead to empathy, curiosity and debates, individually or collectively. It does not matter if the reflection is made within oneself or shared with friends, but if it can motivate the viewer to look deeper into the subject, raise consciousness or leave a sensible trace in someone or in a conversation, it already seems like a wonderful impact to me.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Dali's Muchacha en la Ventana. No other visual artwork impacted me that much since I saw it for the first time. It's been 10 years now and I cannot think of another one.
Is there anything you want to add?
Thank you so much for the opportunity! Gracias a mis amigos mezcaleros y agaveros para la confianza y el tiempo.

Under Mezcal Influence
Project statement

Mexico is home to the world’s richest biodiversity of agaves of all the world, hosting hundreds of species and thousand years old human-agave interactions. Over the last decade, the growing international demand for mezcal, an agave-based spirit, has been pressuring Mexican territory and its inhabitants at a pace that is far too aggressive for both the rural dynamics and the plant’s intrinsic temporalities. However, the storytelling around mezcal in Oaxaca’s tourist region is highly positive, selling an Arcadian vision of ancestral purity and wrongly referring to pre-hispanic origins.

Mezcal is currently the star of the worldwide’s spirituous scene for the uniqueness of its artisanal production. Still, the picudo, a plague eating the agaves from the hearth, is silently threatening the industry. Its appetite for agave is due to the decrease of other plants typologies in the fields, consequence of long periods of dryness and of the use of herbicides in the monocultures. As the abundance of the picudo is usually resolved with the use of even more pesticides, enhancing a vicious circle, its figure contains all the paradoxes characterizing the actual mezcal narrative.

In the common language emerging around mezcal, it is said that its consumption makes you magical. Under Mezcal Influence visually adopts this magic imaginary to take a closer look at the varieties of the myths and misconceptions of the mezcal world. Influenced by a foreign interest, but immersed in the enchanting esthetics of its rural dimension, the mezcal situation is reflective of a forever dichotomy characterizing the Mexican nation, in between indigeneity and modernity. The use of double exposition and colors referring to popular culture is a way to enhance the superposition of a research for authenticity and the influence of Western exigences.

frédérique gélinas
@frederique.gelinas