A photograph among scientists

Histograms and curves regularly attest to the growing presence of greenhouse gases and other pollutants in the air. Although they are objectified by science, they escape our perception. This is precisely the challenge taken up by the Belgian artist Laure Winants through the Albedo project: to reveal this invisible problem.

Art and science in symbiosis

Laure Winants defines herself as an artist-researcher. She is dedicated to the encounter between art and science, as well as to aesthetic and sensitive perceptions of natural phenomena.

Her project began in 2021 when she took part in the European creative art residency in Toulouse entitled "1+2 Photography & Sciences". This experience gave her the opportunity to meet many researchers and to get to know the oceanologist and geochemist Catherine Jeandel. Emerging from the exchange with the research director at the CNRS, an art/science pair was created, with the common objective to shed light on the biggest, yet invisible drivers of climate change - the atmospheric gases and microparticles that make up atmospheric pollution. But how does one take on such a challenge? How does on make the invisible, the colourless, the odourless perceptible?

Laure Winants opted for immersion in a scientific ecosystem and went to the Pic du Midi de Bigorre atmospheric and astronomical observatory in the Pyrenees. At an altitude of 2,800 metres, she began her tests and experiments in order to create a sensory relationship with the climatic question.

Pollution at the top

While trekking the mountain, Laure Winants and the teams of scientists at the Peak observe various phenomena of global warming. On the snow, they find traces of Saharan sand, pink algae, cryoconites and gases. These fragments on the snow prevent the sun from reflecting back: light and its heat are absorbed, which contributes to atmospheric warming. This is why she calls her project "Albedo", a creation that will consist of two photographic series.

Black Series

For her first series, the photographer collects the material in the field. Indeed, the pigmentation of the photographs is made up of carbon black collected in the filters of the CNRS researchers. Laure Winants develops her photographs in situ thanks to her self- designed handheld device. It consists of a glass plate, a sensitive surface and an inter-negative that allows the photographs to be printed live with all the weather conditions of the moment. The image is constructed in and with the physical conditions of the landscape: solar radiation, climatic conditions, atmospheric gases and minerals.

The result is a simple visualisation: the darker the print, the more polluted the place in which the print was solarised. The photographs reveal carbonaceous landscapes, sometimes at the limit of what is perceivable. Colour is not a time value - day or night - but a measure of atmospheric pollution. This process makes it possible to visualise in real time the carbon black content of the place, and therefore the pollution, invisible to the bare eye.

A new perception of gases

For the second photographic series, the artist and the researcher Catherine Jeandel continue their collaboration on the identification of atmospheric gases present on the Peak. After several months of work alongside CNRS researchers and numerous trial and error experiments, the pair developed a method for visualising these states of matter, using reactors with high concentrations of black carbon, methane and carbon dioxide.

The process consists of enclosing photographic films in these reactors for a month. These gases, thanks to a certain temperature, attack the film in different ways depending on the gas. In this way, Laure Winants obtains photographs that reflect the gases present in the reactors. The CO2, for example, has a more punctual and concentrated attack on the film.
This method permits the visualisation of the attack of gases on a device. The result is there... The invisible has taken shape.

Aesthetics as a call to action

The ambient environment of the mountain permeates the images to give form to what is not visible to the bare eye. In one series, deposits of carbon black or microplastics collected on the Peak are made visible as the pigment base of the photographs. In the other, harmful greenhouse gases are made visible through the interaction of the photographic film and the reactors. The scientists' data have become perceptible and tangible: art makes it possible to understand little-known or complex scientific realities. In this way, it is possible to make the public aware of certain invisible causes of global warming. The artist hopes that this understanding of the issues through sensibility and aesthetics will contribute to a more rapid transition to action.

Heading for the Far North

This year, other interdisciplinary projects are on Laure Winants' agenda. In April 2023, she will head for the Arctic for a one-month artistic residency on board of an icebreaker, followed by a second month at the Spitsbergen Artist Center in Norway. This new challenge tackles the crisis of sensitivity of the living. This research, called Artic Sensor Studies, aims to reveal, through art and science, a network of connections that interweave biological, social and technoscientific systems.

Prize-worthy photography

Laure Winants' work received the special attention of the Cité internationale des arts, which named her laureate of the "artist development programme" 2022 edition and hosted her in residence with the support of the European Investment Bank Institute. On this occasion, the artist exhibited her experimental prints and the result of a research project conducted with scientists on volcanic eruptions. One more way to explore the boundaries between science and art.