Each year, the “Emergence” section of the Rencontres d’Arles reveals new voices, bold visual writing, and often the first public traces of long-term work. A true laboratory of contemporary photography, it showcases projects where form and content are experimented in a direct relationship with the world.
For this 2025 edition, the proposals from the Emergence sector demonstrate a keen interest in questions of identity, gender, memory, and territory. Each photographer draws on their own grammar, ranging from personal archives, documentary investigation, introspection, or societal immersion. From Japanese roads to the French legions, from the Peruvian Amazon to the streets of Mexico City, the stories intersect and confront each other with a rare intensity.
We have selected five projects that particularly struck us, through their evocative power, their unique perspective, or their ability to fully inhabit photography as a critical space.
Louise Mutruel – Only you can complete me
The story goes that the automobile customization craze hit Japan in the 1970s under the influence of post-war American culture. Inspired by American decorated trucks, the Japanese reinterpreted dekotora trucks as a sophisticated and dedicated craft. Through this hobby, enthusiasts redraw their identities and devise mobile avatars for themselves. Utility vehicles—whether for transportation or construction—are transformed by their owners into hybrid objects. These continue to blend traditional forms, such as updated ukiyo-e prints, and popular influences, such as the inspiration of the robot armor of the 1980s science fiction series Gundam. In the 1990s, dekotora were considered too flashy and garish. They were banned from city centers and forbidden to drive with their headlights on at night. In response, their owners withdrew to the suburbs, taking over parking lots, gas stations and industrial areas as sanctuaries to share their passion.
On Sundays, large dekotara gatherings are held throughout Japan. These events are an opportunity for the Art Truck Club to come together to parade, exchange ideas and perform a series of rituals. Sacred figures such as the Niô (Shinto temple guardians), Ebisu (God of the Sea) and Hannya (demonic figure of Noh theater) abound on the bodyworks as protective talismans and auspicious prayers. By displaying their favorite icons on their trucks, drivers become storytellers, who seem to embrace a way of reenchanting their daily work on the road.
Through the prism of the dekotora community, Louise Mutrel has approached gatherings as spaces of collective belief and crucial sites of aesthetic experimentation. Part visual narrative, part documentation, “Only You Can Complete Me“ is at once a sensitive archive of this subculture and a sensory experience. In the swirling atmosphere of these great gatherings, Mutrel has captured their energy and intensity: the eye—already saturated, bathed in chrome, flush in bumpers, or lost in the sky—searching for a detail, a sign, a glint.
Musuk Nolte – The Belongings of the Air
Musuk Nolte travelled to the Peruvian Amazon on several occasions. Driven by a commitment to the lives of the indigenous communities inhabiting the region, he has been working on a long-term documentary project that follows their struggles. “The Belongings of the Air“ is a photographic series that forms part of this project and depicts the artist’s experience with ayahuasca during his time with the Shawi indigenous community in the Paranapura river basin. Guided by Julio, a local shaman, and the omnipresent voice of his mother, Nolte embarks on an inner journey where, in his words, he is able to dream with his eyes open, exist in another dimension and see into the unknown.
The artist’s visual exploration focuses on how the unrepresentable can be made visible and how a spiritual experience can be linked to a social interest in light of his role as disseminator and observer of indigenous thought. This reflection takes the form of a dialogue between documentary and auteur film in which the artist’s work as a photographer is reformulated. In this way, the record of the dismantling of an indigenous territory through documentary images is supplemented by an experimental representation of the urgent need to preserve the intangible heritage of indigenous peoples. The ayahuasca experience evokes the spirit of resistance to globalisation and its neoliberal policies.
Like an atlas interconnected by visions, this project draws us into the synaesthetic realm of photography and prompts us to reflect on the symbolic place of the subject in the world. Echoing the indigenous cosmovision, the artist’s images seek to convey the importance of situating the individual as part of a whole, marking a clear contrast with the Western thinking that has permeated social dynamics in Latin America. Nolte provokes a confrontation with the present, in which different visions of the world jostle for legitimacy and the possibility of coexisting alongside one another.
Octavio Aguilar – Tajëëw and Kontoy
In the artistic work of Octavio Aguilar, winner of the Roederer Prize 2025, mythology offers an opportunity to reconstruct memories of Santiago Zacatepec (Oaxaca, Mexico), his birthplace and current residence. Tajëëw and Kontoy are the names of the ancestors of the Ayuuk community, whose origins are passed down via oral transmission from one generation to another. Aurea Romero, his grandmother, has been an important guide, helping him understand his cultural genealogy. Through conversations with her and other inhabitants in the region, he has been able to reconstruct a narrative that withstands processes of symbolic colonisation.
The artist’s awareness of the value of his indigenous roots is conveyed in his work through the recognition of his mother tongue. As a Spanish and Mixe speaker, Aguilar explores the relationship between image and text as a dichotomy that allows him to perceive nuances in his identity. In this way, Mixe, Ayuuk or the language of the mountains represents his sense of belonging to a local culture.
Octavio Aguilar’s work echoes a recent trend in the visual arts in Latin America, in which indigenous voices tell their stories in the first person. “Neither by hook nor by crook” and “Never defeated” are some of the slogans used in the project to express the desire for indigenous autonomy. In the artist’s work, photography is a vehicle for keeping the past alive and allowing it to coexist with a globalised present. It also transmits a belief in linguistic coexistence in the contemporary world, where differences are being eroded. In this regard, the artist’s role in his community is gradually becoming closer to that of a mëja’aytyëjk (elder), who weaves images and words to construct a public sphere based on listening and local knowledge transmission.
Julie Jobert – Patria Nostra
“Patria Nostra“ is an auteur photography project that explores the notion of masculinity through a visual record of the French Foreign Legion, which is made up of people who have left behind their countries, cultures, languages and loved ones in the hope of a new life. The artist uses portraiture to examine the unique identity forged in military settings. The depiction of the face as a symbol of the individual comes up against a collective image constructed by the anonymity of some of the legion’s members.
In this context, identity is framed as part of a constant resistance to expectations. Joubert uses the codes governing discipline, performance and hygiene to approach the military environment as a space in which cultural differences are erased and the stories of individuals are subtly expressed in certain characteristics of their bodies. With her gaze, the artist follows the process of enlistment with a focus on the notions of fraternity and virility.
For her, these concepts provide a foundation for researching the role of masculinity in societies shaped by migration.
The members of the Foreign Legion share the same youthfulness. Their foreign status also unites them in a limbo marked by uncertainty over their futures. Displaced by the political context in their countries of origin, they see the military as an opportunity to rebuild their present by surrendering their past. “Patria Nostra” opens up a debate around the value attributed to certain lives within societies and the role of hypermasculinity in political discourse. For Joubert, observing the push and pull of physical strength and emotional fragility within individuals reveals the human dimension of a community whose citizenship is still being constructed.
Heba Khalifa – Tiger’s Eye
The expression tiger’s eye’ is used in Arab societies as an insult to refer to a particular defiant female gaze. Heba Khalifa’s photographic project is set in the cultural context of the city of Cairo, the capital of Egypt, during the era of her childhood. This period reappears in her present as the embodiment of a time suppressed due to trauma and pain, which is reworked using photographic images as a way to cast light on the grieving process.
Using experimental visuality, the artist explores the transgressive role of memory in triggering public debate around sexual abuse. As part of this debate, she resignifies her status as a victim, first as a place of enunciation where she can construct symbolic reparations towards herself, and subsequently as an identity that allows her to condemn the social pact that legitimates gender-based violence.
Her visual journey explores childhood as a space made ominous by lived experiences in the domestic setting. By reinterpreting photos from her family album using photomontage and journalling, she reveals the complex role of family and religion as social structures for gender indoctrination. Meanwhile, the use of portraits allows her to symbolically search for her own face, which had gone missing amid the silence imposed by a strongly patriarchal society.
The artist’s act of combining visual fragments of her childhood represents her intention to make amends to her body and pave the way for a new conception of herself in the present. Against this backdrop, photography offers support in the emotional healing process. Through her work, Khalifa reframes the expression ‘tiger’s eye’ as a gaze that embodies the active role that women can play in contemporary society in Cairo, allowing history to change course and life itself to be reinvented.
The Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles will take place from July 7 to October 5, 2025. Click here for more information on venues and exhibitions.
