Photomanipulation nominee

“A dog, your daily life, a tornado, sodium, your eyelids ... heavy, burdensome as a stem, you're in a cave, it's hot ... in a hypnotic state ... you fall asleep. After the remaining recollections of the day have evaporated, you see fabulous monsters, horrific nymphs, your mind invents impractical creatures. I present to you here the fantasies of my imagination at the time of falling asleep, a kind of surrealist statement of a frequent aspect in my existence in the form of diurnal arcana.” Like a world seen from the eyes of a child, a world from which unexplored zones seem to be absent, it is a fragmented territory whose boundaries are imaginary but at the same time a source of anxiety and an invitation to go beyond them. “It will be possible to create as many chimera as there are possibilities for a body to be fragmented.” Appreciating corporeality raises the question of the links between the body and its representation, between the lived body and the fictitious body, and the ‘mirror stage’, according to Jacques Lacan.

Nathalie De Zan is a French multimedia artist born in 1985 in Toulouse, France. She has a twin sister with whom she has a very strong bond with and tells about their relationship in some of her artwork. She developed early on a taste for art by her grand-mother who pushed for her to be sent to a children’s art school. Fascinated by art, color and poetry, she decided to go this path. In 2010 she graduated with a Master of Fine Art from the Jaurès University. During the first years at university she started to become fascinated by the French and German tales. She did an internship at the Collège de France in Paris with Patrick Imbert who taught her the photographic studio techniques. She did her first exhibition in 2009 after that she started to show her works in various places around France. After this period she really started to develop her own creative process using influences from her dreams. Her works remain autobiographical and show some attributes of feminism, pop art, and erotica. Absurd, surreal and sometimes naive, her artwork has become more and more full of colors over the years.