Nature as a curator

Henrike Stahl has a highly unconventional way of working on her photography. The artist likes to experiment, as she did within the framework of her residency time at Château Palmer in 2023. At the winery in Bordeaux, she observed their unusual bio-dynamic agricultural practices. She spoke with us about her sources of inspiration, her artistic analogue picture processing, and the role of nature.

LFI: Your photographs feel both documentary and fictional. What approach did you take for L’arc sera parmi les nuages?
Henrike Stahl: Of course, I wanted to work as closely as possible with the people there, which meant a documentary approach; and then to allow nature to play the role of curator, which meant an artistic approach. Allowing the accidental to create something new. Surrendering to something that can't be directed.

Nature as a curator – that's an interesting concept.
I looked at the way the vintners work, then wondered how I could convey it in my photography.

How did you integrate natural phenomena into your art?
Water is present everywhere in the winery. When it starts to rain, everyone runs around like busy ants to save the vines from fungi. The sea also threatens to rise, and so on. I dipped prints in the waters of the Garonne River. It contains both sand and salt, which produce a special effect when it dries. I let other prints grow mouldy in the dampness.

Some motifs were not classically developed on paper.
I printed a couple of motifs on cotton and silk. Then, I buried them in the ground, allowing the water and other things to make them fade – just like the animal horns that get buried in the soil.

Crystalline structures and fractures are also seen on your prints, at times.
I copied this from certain crystallisation processes. Wine is allowed to react with copper, and winemakers can then read certain things from this. Some of my prints were immersed in wine for two or three days.

In certain series, like A Color Project and L’arc sera parmi les nuages, we see interesting effects in the form of coloured mist. How do you create that?
In the picture of the pigs, it's coloured smoke. In A Color Project, I simply wanted to give the sadness of autumn a bit of colour. I was probably just in a better mood. My nephew and I walked through the forest, which was all white from quarry dust. So we set off firecrackers and produced smoke, which I later coloured on the screen. It even worked well with the mist in the Alps...