19 April – 15 June 2025

Victoire Thierrée discovered the island of Okinawa through the work of photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu (1930-2012) during her first visit to Japan in 2012. Tōmatsu was the first to document the American military presence on the island, a work that led to the publication of Okinawa Okinawa Okinawa in 1969.

In 2019, she explored this territory where thirty-two American military bases and some ten thousand GIs still exist. She produced a series of black-and-white photographs in 6 × 9 (vertical) format, focusing on the outskirts of the bases, where the omnipresent nature seems to offer a form of resistance to this occupation. This first series marked the start of a wider exploration.

In 2023, she went to the Smithsonian archives in Washington to research the botanist Egbert H. Walker (1899-1991), who directed a large-scale project in the Ryūkyū Islands after the war. As part of the Servicemen’s Collecting Program, Walker mobilised American soldiers to collect natural specimens (plants, corals, minerals, etc.) from the territories they occupied. In 1951, he supervised the collection of over eight thousand plant samples from areas scarred by the violent fighting of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. From these archives, Victoire Thierrée selected forty herbarium plates, which she photographed in black and white. Okinawa !! brings together these two series of photographs.

Artist

Sculptor, photographer and video artist Victoire Thierrée explores the links between nature, form and technology, as they are used by man to overcome his limits in extreme military, defense and survival contexts. Victoire Thierrée was awarded the Villa Albertine residency in the United States in 2023. She developed a research project at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles on Experiments in Art and Technology (E.AT.) and held her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Chasseur-cueilleur, at the Green gallery (Milwaukee). In 2021, she completed a research residency at the Observatoire de l’Espace of the Centre national d’études spatiales (Cnes) on astromobiles on the planet Mars.

In January 2025, this research took the form of a series of brass sculptures photographed in the Algerian desert during her residency at Rhizome, in partnership with the French Institute. In 2024, she also created a steel sculpture entitled Caillou, modified by atmospheric pressure during a balloon flight to 30,406 meters (stratosphere), before returning to Earth.

In 2025, she will produce her first publication, Okinawa! with publisher RVB BOOKS. Her projects have been supported by the Centre national des Arts Plastiques (Cnap), the Fondation des Artistes (FNAGP), the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC), the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC), the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the Institut Français and the Observatoire de l’Espace du Centre national d’études spatiales (Cnes).

Cirva

(Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques)

The Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques (Cirva) is an art center that places creation at the heart of its project. Occupying a unique position on the world stage since 1983, it invites artists and designers to work freely with a specific material: glass. They are welcomed into the Cirva workshop alongside a team of top-level glass technicians, with whom a dialogue is established. This exchange develops over time, with each visit. This tool offers the opportunity to conduct daring experiments where the unlimited paths of thought meet a material reputed to be complex and unpredictable. Cirva’s collection of over a thousand pieces bears witness to the experiments carried out with guest artists, who donate certain pieces to the association at the end of their collaboration. Cirva is committed to bringing this collection to life and making it accessible to as many people as possible, through partnerships and loans for exhibitions and off-site events. This distribution is accompanied by privileged moments of discovery in the workshop, which can be visited on open days.Cirva is a non-profit organization recognized as being of public interest, and has been supported since its creation by the French Ministry of Culture / Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, the City of Marseille, the Conseil Régional Sud Paca and the Conseil Général des Bouches-du-Rhône.

Mention

The Okinawa !! project was selected and supported by the Fondation des Artistes sponsorship committee. It also received support from the Centre national des arts plastiques for an artistic project in 2019 and 2022. Okinawa !! also benefited from Victoire Thierrée’s residency at the Villa Albertine, a program of the Institut français de la culture et de l’éducation. The production of the glass sculptures at Cirva and the exhibition. The Collection Lambert is supported by the Drac PACA, as part of the ‘Mieux Produire, Mieux Diffuser’ program.