Des bêtes effleurées
“Des bêtes effleurées” (2023) by Eugénie Touzé is a film produced during the artist’s residency at the Domaine de Toury in Bourgogne–Franche-Comté. During this residency, Touzé set out with her camera to search for forms of life in the immediate surroundings of the estate. As Laure Boucomont, director of the Fertile Association, notes, the artist “took the time to watch and listen to those who live right next to us,” moving through farmland, forest edges, and livestock areas with careful attention and restraint.
The film unfolds as a slow succession of living tableaux, set on the periphery of a town, in the heart of agricultural spaces, and near the forest. Domestic animals, farm animals, and wildlife appear in distant, fleeting gestures, following one another at the rhythm of time’s gradual unfolding. The boundaries between these worlds remain porous, suggesting that what is often perceived as separate realms in fact constitutes a single, shared territory. Des bêtes effleurées approaches the form of a wildlife documentary, yet without narration or commentary: the only voice is that of the landscape itself and of those who shape it, rendered present through a state of quiet, almost invisible visibility.
Eugénie Touzé (FR)
Eugénie Touzé was born in 1997 and lives and works between Paris and Normandy. After studying at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, her work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions. In 2022, she won the Fondation de France Photography Prize, as well as the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles / Paris Prize at the Around Video fair (Lille). She recently won the DJTAL Humain 2025 prize from the Art Mercator association. She has completed several residencies, including at the Théâtre des Expositions (Beaux-Arts de Paris) as an artist-curator; at the Domaine de Toury (Burgundy) in a former farmhouse, invited by the Fertile association; at the Weiss Endowment Fund (Paris), where she worked on the persistence of two photographs taken during a hike in the Romanian Carpathians; and at the Ateliers des Arques (Occitania) at the invitation of the director of ENSAD (Paris), Emmanuel Tibloux. She has just completed a residency at the Manoir de Soisay (Perche Regional Nature Park, Normandy) with artist Tamara Morisset, a site listed as a Historic Monument.
