EN FR
To create is to resist erasure.
In forgotten margins, artists and witnesses transform perception into political action and invent new narratives of the world.
(SAIF x LA KABINE 2024 Emerging Talent Award Winner)
Loin des centres, loin des normes, certains réinventent la liberté dans les marges. Ce travail photographique donne à voir des existences que notre société préfère souvent oublier.
Le Bois de la dauphine, by Elsa Beaumont
This photographic series is the second chapter of a long-term project within a grassroots solidarity collective based in the Cévennes region of southern France.
Since its founding in 1985, the collective has acquired abandoned buildings and transformed them into shelters for marginalized individuals. This work seeks to make visible the life paths that take shape and speak out on the edges of society.
“I also see in it the experimentation of an alternative form of freedom, invented by those rejected by the dominant model*, in places left behind because they are no longer profitable or exploitable.”
In 2020, the community took over a former mountain hotel, perched 1,560 meters up on Mont Aigoual: the Hôtel du Bois de la Dauphine. Built in 1907 for early mountain tourism, it fell into disuse for 30 years. In 1944, Resistance fighters found refuge there, only for it to be burned by retreating German troops. Rebuilt in the 1970s to host Perrier factory workers’ families on vacation, it was once again abandoned, then squatted, and again set on fire.
Today, seven people live there, in a massive concrete block of 2,230 m², spread across three floors and around sixty rooms. This brutalist UFO of a building, lost in wind-swept, rain-beaten mountains, feels suspended outside time and space.
Living here means isolation, no nearby towns, barely any transport. It’s a personal test, a retreat from the world, a radical need to step aside.
When Elsa photographs the place, she knows the people she sees might not be there next time. There’s a quiet sense of vanishing, of things slipping away, captured in the everyday fragments of this strange, in-between world.
As she photographs, the hotel’s massive presence contrasts with an almost weightless atmosphere, a mirage-like quality where layers of past and present lives emerge subtly. The tension between the vast, half-empty building and the few, scattered human figures becomes a central theme.
Stains, creases, objects, traces, fragile and poetic attempts to make this place a home. Elsa doesn't focus on individuals as subjects; they become part of a whole made of shapes, textures, light and shadow. Her perspective shifts, a wall corner, a fogged-up window, a half-seen body. Everything is part of a haunting visual puzzle.
Sometimes, figures appear lost in thought, gazing through misted glass that blurs the view outside. Her images float between interior and exterior, between shelter and exposure, a metaphor for how we exist in the world and how (or if) we belong.
Can this place truly welcome people, or does it always end up pushing them away?
Did its inhabitants choose the margins… or did the world push them there?
* Inspired by filmmaker Chris Marker’s words in Sans Soleil
This project was supported by the DRAC Occitanie.
Elsa Beaumont takes a deeply human, socially engaged approach to photography. Her long-term projects focus on the inner worlds and lived spaces of people excluded from the mainstream, crafting visual narratives where light and material meet with raw emotion.
Her work dismantles stereotypes, builds empathy, and invites us to see “the other” in all their complexity and beauty.
A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, Elsa has won the SAIF x La Kabine Emerging Talent Award, the Maison Blanche Prize, and received a special mention from the FOCALE Prize. She has been a finalist for both the Mentor and QPN awards.
Her photos have been widely exhibited across festivals, galleries and art centers including:
Galerie FOCALE (Nyon, Switzerland), Institut d’Art Contemporain (Le Vigan), Les Boutographies (Montpellier), Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs (Bordeaux), Festival QPN (Nantes), Festival 9PH (Lyon), Les Photographiques (Le Mans), Les Nuits Photographiques de Pierrevert, and Fisheye Gallery at the Salon de la Photo (Paris).
Her work is supported by the DRAC Occitanie, the Occitanie Region, and the Gard Department.
Reporters sans frontières
Forty lenses trained on a world in turmoil.
Between shadow and light, photojournalists capture urgency, pain, and hope.
To mark its 40th anniversary, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) is celebrating the perspectives of forty photojournalists from around the globe as they confront the major challenges of our time, and those yet to come. Through their images, they paint a picture of a world in flux across three key fronts: the environment, exile, and crises. Whether documenting the effects of climate change, reporting from the heart of conflict zones, or tracing the paths of those fleeing repression, journalists play a vital role. They expose, they warn, they inform. Yet even as ecological urgency mounts, wars escalate, and millions are displaced, those who report on these realities are increasingly under threat.
In the Amazon, in Ukraine, in Palestine, along the roads of exile from Afghanistan, Russia, or Mexico, they are on the front lines. To document suffering, but also struggle and hope.
Founded in 1985, Reporters Sans Frontières defends freedom, independence, and pluralism in journalism worldwide. Through daily monitoring of attacks on those who inform us, exclusive investigations, firsthand accounts, and documentaries, RSF sheds light every day on the state of press freedom and the right to information across the globe. By providing assistance and protection to journalists in danger, by denouncing violence and censorship, by fighting impunity and disinformation, RSF stands by a core belief: without free journalism, our right to information is violated—and our ability to make informed decisions is compromised.
With “Photographing the World of Tomorrow,” we celebrate this free journalism.
To create is to break.
It is to search within the breach.
At La Kabine, art doesn’t explain. It unsettles, connects, disrupts, and offers new ways of inhabiting the world.
La Kabine intime opens a creative space where fragile gestures, personal stories, and sensitive experiments intertwine. Here, the body becomes a field of investigation, colors translate unique perceptions, and images sketch shifting territories between memory, ritual, and transformation. It explores the living, its uprisings and wounds, and questions the visible or invisible bonds that connect us to one another. In this ongoing exhibition of fragments, creation is no longer an end in itself, but an exchange, a journey, an attempt to inhabit the world differently.
For its second edition of the OFF, La Kabine opens behind the scenes with the “Kabine secrète,” revealing creative processes in progress. The 2025 residents Eveline Soum, Frédéric D. Oberland, Pepe Atocha, and Adrien Julliard share their research, trials, and gestures in the making. Juliette Larochette offers a sensitive journey between images and sounds, while Florent Basiletti explores transmission and education in imagery with students from the Domaine du Possible school. An intimate exhibition that makes creation a place for exchange and experimentation.
Pepe Atocha reveals the energy of the living through experimental photography. Between intuition, shadow, and ritual, he questions our connection to time, nature, and photographic aesthetics.
Eveline Soum, a Burkinabé photographer, explores notions of memory, body, and identity. Since 2021, she has exhibited between Africa and Europe, developing an approach that is both intimate and engaged.
Adrien Julliard, artist and mediator, works across photography, drawing, and arts education. His approach combines in situ actions and participatory protocols, questioning the emotional dimension of gesture.
Frédéric D. Oberland, visual artist and multi-instrumentalist composer (Oiseaux-Tempête, FOUDRE!), works at the crossroads of image and sound, favoring a synesthetic approach.