Erwan Soyer

After studying history, geography, literature, and art at Université Paris Cité, and earning a degree in graphic design from École Estienne Paris, Erwan Soyer has been developing a visual art practice since 2010 that explores the residual, the discarded, and the mechanisms of memory and forgetting. His work draws inspiration from surrealist poetry, geological processes, theoretical physics, and psychological concepts.

Working primarily with books and archives destined for destruction—notably volumes of physics and biology from the CNRS archives discarded after digitization, or simply salvaged book pages—his practice explores the material obsolescence of paper as a metaphor for the psychological processes of erasure and persistence. His work examines what exists on the margins: materials that have exhausted their primary function but retain a latent potential, like repressed memories harboring dormant meaning within the psyche.

Developing a unique paper-folding technique inspired by Baroque art and geomorphology, and working with materials in a raw and organic way to evoke the layered nature of memory itself, her approach can be described as mnemonic plasticity (from the Greek mnêmê, memory + plastos, molded) – sculpting memory as...

École supérieure Estienne Paris - Graphic design
Université Paris Cité - Lettres & Art - Histoire Géographie

_ Re-Pli - La Fenêtre - 2016
_ Parallèle - Librairie Un Jardin de Livres - 2012
_ 100 Curators 100 Days - Saatchi Gallery online - 2012