Bourse du Talent 2026 : Guillaume Fustec

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In the summer of 2020, the disputed re-election of Alexander Lukashenko sparked a massive and peaceful popular uprising that was met with brutal repression. In response to state violence—including more than 450 documented cases of torture, ill-treatment, and sexual violence, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights—a large proportion of the country’s artists and intellectuals chose exile.

Initiated in January 2022, this project focuses on those artists forced into emigration. A series of portraits made in Germany, Poland, Georgia, Switzerland, and France offers a sensitive panorama of a cultural diaspora erased by political decree. Running through each print, a red line—an echo of Belarus’s white-red-white independence flag—alternately functions as a border, a refuge, or a form of identity censorship.

The project extends beyond photography. It incorporates an archive initiated by Belarusian artist Sergey Shabohin, tracing the trajectory of the country’s artists from the era of Marc Chagall to those living in exile today, making visible the continuity of creative resistance across generations. Added to this is a distinctive sonic dimension: an ongoing correspondence with Anton Anishchanka, an artist who remains in Belarus, whose field recordings capture the wild landscapes of a country that has become almost inaccessible. These sounds create an autonomous yet complementary documentary space—that of a distant and living territory that can now only be reached through artistic collaboration. They allow us to hear what images can no longer access.
It is precisely this multi-voiced structure—photographs, historical archive, and field recordings—that defines the necessity of collaboration.

The narrative cannot be carried by a single medium or a single perspective. It emerges through the interplay of practices and presences, from both inside and outside the country, through a collaboration that is politically risky, and therefore all the more necessary.

Guillaume Fustec is a visual artist and graduate of the Master’s programme at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. His artistic path is rooted in an initial training in theatre in Belarus, where he founded the apartment theatre company Walking Jetlag, active between France and Switzerland, before pursuing parallel studies in philosophy and clinical psychology.

His work operates at the intersection of documentary and fine art photography, performance, and installation, informed by a theoretical inquiry into questions of representation, memory, and resilience. His practice engages with the critical thinking of figures such as Bernard Lamarche-Vadel and Georges Didi-Huberman, while also resonating with the visual languages of artists such as Dolorès Marat and Dirk Braeckman.

Through installations that combine images, texts, and objects, he explores the tensions between intimate narratives and collective constructions. His projects take the form of photographic and video installations, editorial works, and multimedia collaborations.