Anaïs Tondeur (born 1985, France) trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art , London. Working at the intersection of art, science, ecological thinking and poetics, she has taken part in research and residencies that resonate with her inquiry into terrestrial materialities. These include: Artium, Vitoria, 2025; Spot Gallery, Terra dei Fuochi, 2024; National Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel, 2023, and the former seed vault of the Vilmorin Family, 2020–21. Her fieldwork has extended through collaborations with the Musée des Arts et Métiers, CNES, 2019; Chaire Arts & Sciences, École Polytechnique, 2012-13, and a presence at the COP21 through a residency at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and the Pierre and Marie Curie Institute, 2015.
Tondeur's two recent series gather long-term photographic projects rooted in sites of environmental violence—zones of anthropogenic fire, contamination, and ongoing transformation—where industrial and nuclear histories entangle with disrupted ecosystems and precarious life-worlds. From Chernobyl Herbarium, created with flora from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, to Flowers of Fire, formed among the charred and contaminated earth of the Terra dei Fuochi in southern Italy, Tondeur follows plants as guides, learning from the ways they make worlds even amid the ruins.
Both projects emerge from a collaboration with philosopher Michael Marder, exploring ways of attuning to plants through the image-making process in which the plants themselves act as agents of their own inscription. Rather than adopting a distant or extractive gaze, Tondeur turns to the least toxic processes possible, allowing each photograph to reveal itself with the plant together with the elements that host it. Thus, in an entanglement of light, matter, and decay, the plant’s living presence transforms the image into a site of encounter—a space to learn and to cohabit, nurturing new collaborations across species and histories.
Tondeur's practice, anchored in early analogue photographic techniques, unfolds as a composition between time, chemistry, and ecological ethics. Working through sustainable processes, she considers the image as a sensitive membrane—one that listens, receives, and makes perceptible the presence of beings that elude conventional visibility. Here, the photograph ceases to be a representation; it becomes a passage, through which entities otherwise invisibilised might speak or resist..