Florent MENG LECHEVALLIER

"The Unresolved Wave — The Mekong Project"

Route des résidences (Cambodia–Vietnam)

Factory Phnom Penh

November 19 — December 19

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If the Ganges has been considered a living entity for centuries, the debate on the legal

personality of rivers has only recently emerged in France, around the Loire or the Seine. In

March 2017, New Zealand officially recognized the Whanganui River as a legal subject,

capable of “pleading” in court.

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Law is, after all, a collective fiction — a story humanity tells itself, evolving alongside its

awareness of the world. Faced with the ecological crisis, granting rights to non-human

entities becomes an act of resilience. It may not be humanism that needs to be rejected, but

rather its definition and its boundaries.

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Following recent shifts in thinking about our communication with living beings and our ability

to view nature as a fragile entity to be protected, several countries have begun recognizing

certain rivers as having legal identity. It is from this premise that Florent Meng Lechevallier

began a study of the Mekong — a river in constant transformation, subject to current

reversals and salinization, whose flow sometimes seems to unravel itself.

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The Mekong crosses six countries, yet none grants it the same identity. Each has its own

distinct relationship with the river. The photographer’s work so far has focused on Vietnam,

in the Mekong Delta, and on Cambodia, where he observed how riverside populations live

with the river: how they pray to it, cultivate it, exploit it, sometimes suffer from it — and above

all, how they seek to restore a form of balance with it. In these regions dominated by an

extractive economy, he questions how inhabitants compensate for what they take from the

river, and how they imagine a communion with it, a shared future.

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Florent Meng Lechevallier is the recipient of the “Route des résidences” grant, a

cross-residency program co-organized by the French Institute of Cambodia, the French

Institute of Vietnam, and the French Embassy in Thailand. The program offers several artist

residencies throughout the year, focusing particularly on writing and photography. Its aim is

to encourage the circulation of artists and ideas within a regional approach; to foster creative

work nourished by broader intercultural relationships; to offer the laureates diverse working

and residency environments — from major Mekong cities to the Vietnamese, Thai, and

Cambodian countryside; to promote encounters with varied audiences and local artistic

scenes; and finally, to support the creation of singular works at the crossroads of four

countries and cultures.

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Bio

Born in France in 1982, Florent Meng Lechevallier graduated from the École nationale

supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (ENSBA) and the Workmaster program at the Geneva

University of Art and Design (HEAD). Since 2010, he has developed a body of work at the

crossroads of photography and film, fiction and documentary. His practice explores how

territories shape the behaviors, customs, and identities of the communities that inhabit them,

while questioning the forms of resistance that emerge from these contexts.

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His works have been exhibited notably at MAC Lyon, Le Quadrilatère, and Villa du Parc, and

his films have been screened at the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève as well as in

numerous festivals.