Nanténé Traoré — pays des merveilles

From 30 September to 29 November 2026, the MEP Studio hosts pays des merveilles, Nanténé Traoré's first museum monographic exhibition. Through a vivid iconography of intimacy, his work offers a meditation on memory, attachment, and disappearance.

Nanténé Traoré's return to the Breton coast, which he frequented as a child with his mother, brings back traumatic memories and marks the beginning of a period of deep depression and dissociation.

Created from expired film rolls dating from the 1990s, the images convey this state of turmoil where reality seems to slip away. Chemical alterations of the film modify colours, blur contours, and produce unstable, almost ghostly visions.

In this landscape inhabited by memories, walks become a way to shift his attention to the world around him and what constitutes it: the shores, birds, stray dogs, or familiar sleeping silhouettes. His gaze rests on the fragile beauty of beings and places destined for erasure.

Crossed by hazy, blue or orange lights, the images blur the boundaries between forms: bodies become landscapes, and landscapes become the reflection of inner states.

The film extends this experience of dissolution: a fixed shot of a landscape is accompanied by the artist's inner voice, guiding us to the heart of this sensitive and memorial drift.

The exhibition brings together a new analogue photographic project, created in Brittany in summer 2025, as well as a film shot during a residency in Albania during summer 2026.