Bourse du Talent 2026 : Caroline Ruffault

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The Sky is Bigger in Texas, produced during an artist residency in Marfa in November 2024, is a visual investigation into the disappearance of the landscape driven by our dependence on the automobile and the ecological disasters it has generated in the Permian Basin. The project unfolds through two parallel narratives, linking the oil fields of northwest Texas to the desert expanses of Big Bend National Park in the south. Though seemingly opposed, these territories are in fact deeply connected by the automobile.

The project questions our relationship to the mythology of the landscape. The images unfolding beyond the windshield evoke the imagery of the road trip, the sweeping shots of Hollywood cinema, and idealized visions of exploration. Yet behind these postcard-perfect vistas lies a profoundly altered territory: oil wells, extraction sites, and roads carved through lands that were once largely untouched.

In the north, an encounter with rancher Schuyler Wright sheds light on the lasting consequences of this exploitation. Abandoned wells—some of them officially reclassified—continue to leak toxic water, contaminating the soil and reshaping the landscape at its very core.

By immersing her film negatives in wastewater produced by shale oil extraction, Caroline Ruffault overlays the material reality of environmental destruction onto our imagined landscapes, revealing the hidden side of the scenes we consume. Chemical alterations spread across the surface of the image, sometimes erasing it altogether. The landscape does not simply disappear; it visibly deteriorates before our eyes, exposing the underside of the images through which we experience and imagine the world.

Trained in film and audiovisual studies in Paris, Caroline Ruffault moved to Texas in 2013 before earning her DNSEP (National Higher Diploma in Artistic Expression) in Art from EESAB Lorient in 2022. She has developed a photographic practice focused on transitional spaces, where the boundaries between bodies, landscapes, and narratives are constantly being redefined.
Her work explores the ways in which territories shape identities while being transformed in turn by those who inhabit them. She is particularly interested in the intimate connections between people and places, as well as the invisible memories that permeate them.
Her practice brings together two distinct image-making approaches: a documentary mode, often in black and white, that captures the traces of interactions between people and their environments; and a more experimental register, in which color and image alterations convey emotional, sensory, and symbolic dimensions.
By challenging dominant representations, Caroline Ruffault offers a vision of contemporary territories that is both political and poetic.