Louis-Cyprien Rials: Stories Written in the Landscape

Louis-Cyprien Rials goes to places most people advise leaving: radioactive zones, unrecognized states, post-war cities, deserts, and disputed territories. He doesn't seek danger or the exoticism of a closed world. He's interested in places where history has already happened but continues to live on — in the soil, architecture, ruins, religious rituals, and an almost tangible silence. The artist himself calls such territories "involuntary nature parks." These are spaces that humans have rendered uninhabitable through war, radiation, borders, or industrial violence, and then abandoned. Nature returns here not as a symbol of healing, but as another witness to the events, slowly absorbing radars, oil rigs, military equipment, and empty cities. This is why, in Louis-Cyprien Rials's works, the landscape ceases to be a backdrop and becomes the protagonist. His films consist of long, motionless takes where almost nothing happens: the wind, smoke, water, and fire move, and the hot air trembles. The camera doesn't explain what it sees or attempt to turn the territory into documentary evidence. It observes. And gradually it becomes clear that the absence of people here doesn't mean emptiness. On the contrary, every frame is filled with traces of vanished communities, former regimes, wars, and ideologies. For Louis-Cyprien Rials, territory is an archive. Only instead of documents, it contains earth, concrete, ruins, and memory. This is why geopolitics, archaeology, mythology, and religion are constantly intertwined in his works. An oil field simultaneously becomes a biblical site, an ancient statue begins to speak to modern Iraqis, and an abandoned city becomes a monument not only to war but also to the human desire to control space. At the same time, Louis-Cyprien Rials never trusts a single way of telling the world. Documentary film collides with fiction, archaeology with digital technology, and classic film genres are given unexpected new life. The Western is stripped of its heroes, Kurosawa's Rashomon is transported to modern-day Uganda, and digital images become reflections on how the internet, tourism, and popular culture shape our perceptions of distant places before we've even seen them. In recent years, people have increasingly featured in his practice. While his early projects primarily explored traces of human presence, new works are born from extensive travel and collaboration with local communities. Young musicians in Iraq, Wakaliwood actors in Uganda, or contemporary heirs of ancient Sumerian culture become not objects of observation but full participants in the artistic process. Louis-Cyprien Rials explores not the conflicts themselves, but what remains in their wake: how territories retain memory, how landscapes become political, and how myths continue to live within contemporary reality. His work exists on the borders of documentary film, contemporary art, and visual anthropology, transforming the landscape into a witness to history and challenging the viewer to re-examine places that are too often reduced to news headlines or geopolitical maps.