Bourse du Talent 2026 : Bastien Deschamps

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In French Guiana, illegal gold mining has intensified since the 1990s with the large-scale arrival of Brazilian garimpeiros. This gold rush has led to severe environmental degradation, the deforestation of riverbanks, and the long-term contamination of waterways by mercury, with the Indigenous Wayana communities among its primary victims.

This work forms part of a long-term documentary project initiated in 2022, exploring the many facets of gold mining: the Wayana people, the miners themselves, their personal trajectories, their precarious lives in the forest, and the hidden logistical networks that sustain this opaque system.

In the section presented here, centred on the Wayana, photography becomes both trace and material. The negatives were developed using water from the Maroni River and mercury, reproducing within the photographic process itself the contamination that permeates bodies and territories. The image stains, dissolves, and deteriorates; it carries the toxic memory of the river. Other images, embedded in synthetic gold, depict mining sites and the scars they leave across the forest. The golden surface creates a tension with the deceptive beauty of the metal: gold becomes both radiance and wound, light and collapse.

Through these images, the intention is not to identify culprits but to reveal the complexity of a system in which the miners are both agents and victims, caught within the violence of an economic model that exceeds them. To show the consequences without forgetting the causes. Situated between immersion and alteration, between documentary observation and poetic gesture, this work brings together French Guiana’s two poisons—gold and mercury—to tell the story of a wounded territory.

Bastien Deschamps (Paris, 1990) is a photographer and visual artist. After several years working in the performing arts, he dedicated himself entirely to photography in 2015. Recipient of a Wall Street Journal scholarship, he graduated in 2019 from the Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism programme at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

His practice is geopoetic, situated at the intersection of documentary, experimental, and poetic approaches. Through the lens of raw emotion and wandering, he addresses social issues by exploring power relations inscribed within landscapes, borders, rivers, and marginal territories. The materiality of the image is central to his work: support, process, and physical transformation become carriers of meaning in their own right.

Since 2022, he has been developing Where the Border Runs, a five-chapter project following border rivers across different territories. The first chapter, dedicated to the Evros River, was published in 2024 by Éditions d’une rive à l’autre. He is currently working on the Maroni River in French Guiana.

Alongside this project, Le poulpe au regard de soi(e) and the collective Swansong explore an ante-futurist perspective: a radical critique of technological systems that claim either to represent the world or to replace it.