For its sixth edition, the jury of the “Madame Figaro” prize with the Rencontres d’Arles 2022 has chosen the young Egyptian photographer Amina Kadous, who has created an intimate and universal work on the erosion of a part of her history. a country symbolized by cotton cultivation.
The jurors of the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro – Arles unanimously chose Amina Kadous, born in Cairo in 1991, for her project entitled “White Gold”, presented in the exhibition “Si un tree falls in a”. forest”, in the Cruise area. The photographer weaves the story of family and national history from El-Mahalla El Kubra, his birthplace and pioneering center of the cotton industry to the late 1970s around the Misr Spinning & Weaving Company, then the largest textile mill in the world. . In 1969, Amina’s grandfather established his cotton factory there. His son joined him twenty years later. And in 2006, Egypt’s protest action started there, in the textile sector.
A work of memory
The White Gold series evokes the voids left by time as Egyptian cotton declines. A work of memory, sensitive, poetic and intelligent, which seeks to bring together the traces of his childhood, between loss and transfer, in the grandfather’s house and in the cotton fields. “The series is a search for my personal identity and national identity. A cycle of failure and opportunity. (…) Uprooted and torn from the ground, I see my reflection on the cotton road. A symbol of what I am constantly trying to become. The white cotton flower is transformed inside and out until it is woven, turned into fabric. In the same way, I try to adapt to the outside world, weave my life into today’s currents. Inspired by my grandparents’ legacy, their records, and the decaying history of my country, I am trying to reconnect and harvest what is left of our growing cottonseed. to dry What was once the main symbol of our Egyptian identity,” he explains.
Documentary work, which he talks about as “small fragments of a long search to understand his present”. Although a new disproportionate capital city, Al Masa, is being built in Egypt.
Amina Kadus studied in Boston. His work has been exhibited there, as well as in London, Paris, Cape Town and Mali. In December 2019, he received the Center Soleil d’Afrique Award at the 12th edition of the Bamako Photography Biennale.
Evening in the ancient theater
The Madame Figaro Rencontres d’Arles photography prize is awarded every year since 2016 during an evening at the ancient theater. The winner receives a donation of 10,000 euros and is invited to implement the published project next year. Madame Figaro. In return, he gives the prints of the Fondation des Rencontres d’Arles, which enrich the collection created more than fifty years ago, which contains images of the great names of photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. The awards are supported by Kering’s Women in Motion program, BMW Group France and Barbara Sturm.
This year, the Madame Figaro Photo Prize was chaired by Virginia Efira, surrounded by Anne Berest, Jean-Pierre Blanc, Nicolas Di Felice, Brigitte Lacombe, Caroline de Maigret, Kamel Menour, Suheila Yacoub, Rebecca Zlotowsky and… -Florence Schmitt, Editor-in-Chief Miss Figaro. Amina Kadus joins our previous laureates. the Spanish Laya Abril, crowned in 2016 for her project on the history of homosexuality, the Chilean Paz Errazuriz, who was persecuted by Augusto Pinochet, showing those whom society does not look at, the Polish Wiktoria Wojciechowska, who documented the war in Donbass. Greek Evangelia Cranioti form of icon painters for immersion by sailors and dock dwellers, and Sudanese Eytar Gubara, who showed images of women in male-dominated Sudan.
Source: Le Figaro
