DAMI is an intimate, poetic, and sensory journey imagined by SMITH, a visual artist and researcher whose work explores the connections between the visible and the invisible, the human and the non-human, matter and spirit.
Created as part of the Instants residency, initiated by Leica and Château Palmer, the project draws from the artist’s family history and from a broader inquiry into our origins, beliefs, and relationship with the living world. One of the project’s founding coincidences was the unexpected discovery that SMITH’s grandparents had met—at different times—in the two locations where Dami was developed: Le Fresnoy and Château Palmer.
The book blends photography, thermograms, sculpture, and text in a polyphonic composition where the voices of Jean-François Clervoy, Corine Sombrun, Juan Zuniga, Émilie Husson, Viviane Vincent-Tejero, and Sabrina Pernetintersect. A unifying narrative thread by Erwan Desplanques guides the reader through this journey.
The publication takes the form of a sensitive cartography of the contemporary world. It celebrates the fragile unity of life through an experience where memory, trance, dream, compost, vine, and transforming bodies interact. Dami is at once an investigation, a tribute, and an attempt at repair—a visionary work shaped by intuition, ghosts, roots, and a quiet faith in what the world may still reveal.
Smith
Artiste, Cinéaste, Photographe
“SMITH’s work cannot be reduced to its asserted content on gender, identity and the relationship to the cosmos, for even though he is constantly confronted with these fundamental questions, which logically lead him to collaborate with artists from other fields and scientists from all disciplines, he goes beyond them in the aesthetic stakes that he puts into play “1.
Photographer, visual artist, director and researcher, SMITH explores the inner and outer porosities of human identity. He deploys a polycephalous research and creation methodology, joining forces with researchers, scientists, philosophers, designers, engineers, performers and musicians to conceive world-works with unlimited temporality. Disrupting genres, languages and disciplines, SMITH proposes curious works, in the etymological sense of cura: curiosity and care for the world around us, the earthly and the celestial, the human and the non-human, the visible and the invisible, imagination and fiction. By appropriating tools such as thermal cameras, drones, neon lights and metal prints, his fluid work is composed with technological means that incorporate the dimensions of mystery and dream.
Thus, through works such as “Löyly”, “Spectrographies”, “TRAUM”, “Saturnium” or more recently “Désidération”, SMITH makes his own the language of “SF” in the Harawayian sense: at the frontier of Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction and Scientific Facts. His own body becomes the site of hybrid works, integrating gender transition, microchip and subcutaneous meteorite implants, atomic mutations or trance practices.
For more than ten years, SMITH has been working, like so many dialects, with cinema, photography, bio-art and dance, in collaboration with institutions such as the Opéra du Rhin (La Filature – Scène Nationale, Mulhouse); the Centre Georges Pompidou; the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin; the Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN-ICI, Montpellier); the Fondation Hermès – New Settings; the Palais de Tokyo or the Rencontres d’Arles, which have co-produced and disseminated his works and creations.
SMITH devotes a significant part of his time to transmission in the form of conferences/performances (Collège de France and Institut Henri-Poincaré in Paris; Ryerson University, Toronto; University of California, Santa Cruz; MUTEK Festival, San Francisco; Planetarium, Centre Pompidou…). He is currently completing a doctorate in research-creation at the University of Quebec in Montreal, in co-supervision with the Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.
Erwan Desplanques
Auteur, Journaliste
Erwan Desplanques, born in 1980, is a writer and freelance journalist.
A graduate of the École supérieure de journalisme (ESJ) in Lille, he spent fifteen years working as an editor for the weekly magazine Télérama.
In 2013, he published his first novel, Si j’y suis, followed in 2016 by a short story collection, Une Chance unique, which was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize for Short Stories and is currently being adapted for film.
L’Amérique derrière moi is his third book.
He now lives and works in the southwest of France.