The project Acedia by French photographer Louise Desnos offers a visual exploration of idleness, fatigue, and intimacy.
The word acedia refers to a state of profound boredom and apathy. With this project, the artist celebrates idleness, so often disparaged in a contemporary society increasingly focused on productivity and constant self-optimisation. Taking the opposite tack to these pressures for performance and efficiency, Louise Desnos proposes rethinking idleness as a creative act, and as a stance of resistance against alienation at work, relentless competition and the consumerism of the capitalist system.
Her sensitive and contemplative photographs, imbued with literary, cinematic and pictorial influences, bring ‘non-events’ to the fore. Laziness, embodied by the models, seeks to express a rejection of life as it is imposed upon us, in favour of a quest for freedom and a space for introspection, at times tinged with melancholy. For the photographer, the very act of creating this project was a way of reclaiming time and investing it without constraint, in contrast to her paid commissions as a photographer.
A collaboration with Fondation Convergences.
