French photographer, born in 1992
Lives and works in Paris
simonarcache.com
Project supported: MP#04

Trained as a musician, Simon Arcache took up photography in the United States, accompanying Blues musicians on stage and in their daily lives.
Since then, his artistic approach has explored the intimacy of communities and questioned our relationship with others, identity, societies and history.
He regularly exhibits at photography festivals, and his work has appeared in the specialist photography press. In 2020, he won the Diapéro Sound Slide Show Prize, in partnership with Arte and L’Obs, for his photographic film Freeman Vines. In 2023, he won the Prix Voltaire, in partnership with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, for his American series Going Up Going Down, which will take the form of a traveling exhibition in 2023 and 2024.

As part of his mentoring program, and in line with his ongoing interest in music, he would like to pursue a project devoted to the Gnaouas. A brotherhood of descendants of slaves, the Gnaouas have over the centuries developed a religious syncretism between Moroccan Islam and the beliefs of their ancestors from West Africa. Its members are renowned in Morocco for their therapeutic trance music. Focusing on the process of transmission and the feeling of belonging, he wishes to inscribe this research in an intergenerational iconographic dialogue, between the elders, guardians of knowledge, and a new generation, bearers of both ritual and musical evolutions.