Fury is the planet where Ellen Ripley’s ship, heroine of the Alien films, crashes at the beginning of the third film in the saga. A hostile land, ravaged by elemental forces, on which a prison was built. “There is sand, wind, smoke… It is a place that fascinates me; it touches catastrophe,” explains Marie Quéau. “In the very first phase of work, I imagined that the characters I photographed lived on this planet, driven by extreme telluric forces. I love the energy that this title represents.”
Winner of the 2023 LE BAL/ADAGP Prize for Young Creation, the photographer, a graduate of ENSP Arles, admires the speculative power and boundless imagination of science fiction. A creative force she channels into notebooks filled with images collected from old books on natural science and biology. This obsessive gathering allows her to accumulate a kind of raw material: “These are engines for fiction; these elements give me the possibility to go very far and to search for these situations in reality. It also allows me to tell myself that my story holds together,” she says.
The exhibition opens with a giant screen showing a video. We see freedivers, their faces submerged, limbs inert, in the calm water of an Olympic pool. What follows, in contrast, are frantic visuals: sharp edits, fragments of the debris of a fury room—those rooms one rents by the hour to express anger and its cathartic power by destroying technological devices and other household tools. Then, in the basement, in the main hall of Le BAL, the exhibition unfolds in oppressive darkness. Images fall from the ceiling, swallow the walls, erupt from the floor.
From one format to another—videos, archives, screenshots taken from a phone, classical photographs—the bodies approach a threshold, contract, or surrender. Stunt performers, freedivers, prosthetics from horror studios, and budding smashers meet in a form “of internal concentration, of ambient chaos, to apprehend risk and dominate danger—or, in any case, what surrounds us,” explains Marie Quéau.
Studying the wavering
On a clenched hand, gel drips in viscous streaks, used to drastically lower body temperature in preparation for the “human torch” exercise learned by trainee stuntmen. Motionless legs catch fire, trying to acclimate themselves to the fear of burning. Inside a soaked uniform, a stomach retracts under the bite of the cold: a necessary violence when one has just been immolated. In “Fury,” there is no title or caption, no chronology. Only a fragmented before/during/after that blurs the borders of reality to invite fiction into the viewer’s path.
What Marie Quéau seems to seek is displacement, the search for detail—those fragments brought together to confront our fear. In an almost omnipresent monochrome, faces, fingers, and muscles are lit by harsh contrasts, and archival extracts from the artist’s notebooks intersect with her own creations. It is then up to us to untangle truth from falsehood, to study the wavering.
“It is also the translation of a humanity that seeks out these extreme situations. This project tells us something about the state of the world,” says the photographer, who admits to documenting these extreme places in an attempt to express “what is in [her] head.” In the background, “Fury” takes the shape of a distorted mirror held up to its visitors. A mirror reflecting what is darkest or most unfathomable in the exceptional nature of these activities.
At once beautiful and disturbing, the images ask us: where does this need to approach the precipice come from? Why do some choose to “cross the threshold” that Marie Quéau enjoys observing? Is it an ailment particular to our society—the very one that builds rooms designed to be pulverized by the anger it produces? Or, out of chaos, does a form of control finally emerge, the discovery of an unknown that once terrified us, only so we may strip it of its power?
“Fury”, by Marie Quéau, can be seen at Le BAL, in Paris, until February 8, 2026.
