Talk with photographer Lucas Olivet on the occasion of the publishing of his book Medicine Tree with Skinnerboox, in conversation with Danaé Panchaud, director of Centre de la photographie Genève.

"I’ve never seen a tree make so much medicine. Maybe it weeps so much for all the poison here." This quote by Prince George resident Randy Dakota, was the inspiration for the title of this project around the industrial capital of northern BC: the title a testimony, a tribute, a prayer. Dakota, standing in the gravel next to his trailer, was referring to the black spruce, sticky with resin, growing beside it. A region at once wild and poisoned by industry, Prince George is unknown to the majority of Vancouverites, bypassed by tourists, silently servicing the country’s (Canada, the US, China, pick one) pulp and paper needs. Medicine Tree trains its eye on the implications of these extractive industries: the ravaged forests, the polluted rivers, the smoke that snakes its way into front yards and living rooms, which shape social dynamics.

Prince George is located on the unceded territory of the Lheidli T’enneh, and the violence has not been rug-swept, but planted, its roots requiring less a shovel than excavator. Local dancer Kelsey Abraham is the operator of one digger, her ceremonial dancing stick more like a javelin. Laden with photographs that span the decades—frozen faces of all of the dozens of women (the majority indigenous, one as young as twelve) lost on the highway that cuts through Prince George. The stick is its own constellation: of unaddressed lesions, of a longing for reparations, the themes Medicine Tree explores.

USEFUL INFORMATION

Thursday 25 April at 18.00

In French

Free admission, no inscription

The book will available for sale at the end of the discussion