Marilia Destot is a French American photographer.

Her works has been widely exhibited, awarded and published in Europe and the United States in galleries and festivals over the past 20 years. She discovered the country of her maternal ancestors, Lithuania, for the first time in 2001, then returned and began The Journey in 2018. She was invited for a residency in 2019 and an exhibition in 2022 as part of the Memory program of Kaunas, European Capital of Culture 2022. Ségolène Brossette Galerie hosts the artist’s first exhibition in Paris since 2008, as part of the Lithuanian Season in France, 2024.

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Where do you come from?
I’m originally from Grenoble, I studied in Paris, and moved to New York in 2006. I’m now French American, with distant but precious Lithuanian Jewish roots.

How did you become an artist?
I was introduced to photography in the family circle: as a child first, playing and posing for my mother, an amateur photographer, then as a teenager, always watching movies or experimenting in our B&W home photo lab.
Passionate about cinema and photography, I studied photography at the ENS Louis Lumière in Paris. I then became a photographer, at first dedicated to portrait and fashion, while developing my photographic writing on intimacy, time and memory, in exhibition, correspondence and books projects.

What do you want to convey?
Photography is maybe, for me, first and foremost a medium for self-writing. I want to convey stories and a poetic view of the world around me. In my personal work, I use photography as a gesture of affection, contemplation, imagination and memory. The idea of the trace, of retaining time passing or memory fading, have become recurrent themes in my photographic series over the years.

What are you looking for when you manipulate your prints?
Altering the photographic print is a recent practice in my work, starting with The journey in 2018. Or a bit before, while crafting my dummy book La promesse (later published at the éditions Filigranes in 2020). By printing, binding and shaping “home-made” notebooks, I returned to the hands-on and playful practice of the darkroom : a slow, manual, physical production of a paper photographic object.
When I started The Journey, I collected a series of empty landscapes I photographed in Lithuania, and I wanted to make my family, past and present, appear in them, to anchor those empty scenes with a presence. I didn’t want to create photomontages nor diptychs, as I’ve done in the past. I wanted to explore a new technique, and tried piercing through the print, drawing silhouettes, faces or presences, by manually perforating the photographic print with a fine needle. Once the photograph is backlit, the light drawing appears in the landscape : the idea of a subtle but visible trace – only if you make the effort to enlighten it and look at it – seemed to me a beautiful and right way to convey my storytelling.

While making this needle work, I moved away from the computer, which is sadly too omnipresent and time-consuming in our photographer’s lives. I returned to the joy of a manual, playful, experimental studio practice. Similar to my childhood experience, I rediscovered the magic of the photographic medium, when the image rises to the surface in the developer bath in the darkroom.

Then I explored the hand-made collage portrait, : layered portraits, torn portraits, cut out portraits, layers of time or self . A simple technique that I’m using again today in my Memoryscapes series. I’m keen to continue this exploration of the manipulated print, which turns each image into a unique work, an intuitive experience made of chance and happy accidents.

Is The Journey a long-term project like your other family series, La promesse or l’empreinte?
The Journey is the layered tale of my maternal family, and indeed a story I can imagine in several chapters, the first being dedicated to my Lithuanian family roots. The next chapter will certainly take place in France, with another narrative centered on my grandmother, whom I never knew but whose middle name we share : Rachel. To be continued…