This work began after Elsa Leydier travelled to the Amazon rainforest, a place that had long occupied her imagination due to the vast quantity of images — often fantasised — she had encountered throughout her life.

Through the process of construction and deconstruction of images representing the region, this work is an attempt to explore not a territory, but its visual representations.
 

Elsa Leydier revisited images (vernacular and press images that contribute to the construction of the imaginary of the place, along with photographs I took while experiencing the Amazon forest territory), and re-inserted them in a flux of montages, collages, and plastic interventions. The image of the Amazon then appears as a visual construction. My goal here wasn’t to represent the Amazon itself, nor to invite the viewer to immerse themselves into the greenery of the Amazon, but on the contrary to remind them of the surfaces of its representations, and its images as constructs, often fantasised.