Nanténé Traoré — pays des merveilles

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

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

Made from expired film stock dating from the 1990s, the images convey this state of unrest in which reality seems to slip away. The chemical alterations of the film shift the colours, blur the outlines and produce unstable, almost ghostly visions.

In this landscape shaped by memory, walks become a way of turning attention towards the world around him and what makes it up: the shorelines, the birds, the stray dogs, or the familiar sleeping figures.

His gaze settles on the fragile beauty of beings and places destined to fade away. Crossed by hazy light, blue or orange, 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 into the heart of this sensitive and memorial drift.

The exhibition brings together a new analogue photographic project, made in Brittany in the summer of 2025, along with a film shot during a residency in Albania in the summer of 2026.