Pouvoir Print

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 an artistic material. Drawing inspiration from brain neuroplasticity, where neural pathways either strengthen or weaken, her work considers obsolete matter as possessing a similar mnemonic plasticity. The folding and erasure reflect how memory itself is neither fixed nor lost, but perpetually reshapeable. Her work draws on scientific processes – metamorphic transformation, chronotopic fusion, geological discordance, stochastic perturbation, and psychological anamnesis – considered as resources structuring both the visual artwork and the mental experience. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a commission for the private collection of the Alpina Hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland, and site-specific installations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. His works are also featured in private collections in New York and Los Angeles. He has also completed numerous commissions for publishing and the press: five illustrations for the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, two book covers for Juan Villoro published by George Braziller in New York, a cover for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, and an illustration for Le Monde Diplomatique.