Elsa & Johanna

Eyes on Talents member, Elsa & Johanna, are exhibiting a new chapter in their series "The Timeless Story of Moormerland" entitled "The Blurring days" at the Galerie La Forest Divonne in Paris for a few more days. Presented last year at the MEP Studio, the series is organised like a family album, combining posed portraits, spontaneous photographs and fragments of settings. In May 2021, over a period of 4 weeks, the duo travelled across the north of Germany, taking up temporary residence in some fifteen towns, including Moormerland in Lower Saxony. The artists carefully chose houses with an old-fashioned charm to occupy while they imagined and embodied around twenty characters from an imaginary neighbourhood enveloped in a strange atmosphere, demonstrating their talent for storytelling, autofiction and staging.
Elsa Parra and Johanna Benaïnous have been collaborating since 2014 under the duo name Elsa & Johanna. Working at the intersection of photography, performance and video, they have been creating visual narratives of which they are the interpreters ever since they met. The use of autofiction, at the heart of their work, allows them to stage characters freed from their own identity, questioning the contemporary individual and notions of self-representation and anonymity.