“On s’engage, on va le faire” – that is, “We’re in, we’ll do it”. The
New York-based, French-Venezuelan photographer Mathieu Asselin goes
back and forth from Spanish to English to French as he recalls how Sam
Stourdzé, the director of the Rencontres d’Arles, enthusiastically
agreed to exhibit his five-year long, research-intensive project about
the US chemical corporation Monsanto.
It happened a week before last year’s festival, and Asselin was then showing the dummy of his photobook, Monsanto®. A Photographic Investigation.
This year the project is being shown at the Magasin Électrique at
Arles, and the book has been published in French by Actes Sud, and in
English by the Dortmund-based Verlag Kettler.
Asselin’s project is conceived as a cautionary tale putting the
spotlight on the consequences of corporate impunity, both for people and
the environment. Designed by fellow countryman Ricardo Báez, a
designer, curator and photobook collector who has notably worked with
the Venezuelan master Paolo Gasparini, Monsanto® submerges the
reader into an exposé of the corporation’s practices, whether by showing
contaminated sites and the health and ecological damage they cause, the
effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or the pressure on farmers to use
patented GMO seeds.
From an editorial point of view, Monsanto®. A photographic investigation
is a carefully-orchestrated ensemble of portraits, landscapes, archival
material, objects, screenshots, personal letters, court files,
advertisements, microfilms and texts. Asselin has synthesised the
storytelling power of different documentary formats to produce a seminal
work, which echoes W. Eugene Smith’s 1971 project on the Japanese
village of Minamata, and the Chisso Corporation.
“My father [whose words are included in the book] talked to me about
Monsanto eight years ago,” says Asselin, who immediately saw a story in
what he was told. He also acknowledges Marie-Monique Robin’s The World According to Monsanto,
a documentary film which was released in 2008, and published as a book
by Éditions La Découverte and Arte in 2012. “Way beyond the pesticides,
and the genetically-modified seeds, it was essential to understand the
past of Monsanto,” says Asselin.
The author has seen the horror and, as the two central displays in
his Arles exhibition show, the horror has a face – that of Agent
Orange-affected infants preserved in glass containers for science at Tû
Dû Obstetrics Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Asselin
photographed them as well as living victims of Operation Hades, the
original name for the US military operation that sprayed rural areas
with Agent Orange during the war – Monsanto was one of the companies
that produced the chemical, which was officially used as a defoliant.
The most common caption reads: “Multiple genetics disorders and
malformations.”
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