OSLO.- In Marie Bovo’s extraordinary photographic sequence, Les Forêts d’Hypnos, we enter a dreamscape: a forest on a hill at once real and imaginary, factual and mythical.
In a series of large-format photographs of astonishing hues—sapphire and cobalt, intense midnight blue, burnished gold, delicate periwinkle and the palest of pinks—Bovo captures arboreal forms as illuminated only by the light of a full moon: each striking image the product of a night-long exposure, formed while the artist waited, sleepless by her camera, the solitary, wakeful sentry in the shadows of the forest at night.
Following the success of her earlier experiments, produced in coastal woodland of mainland France, Bovo identified two further locations for a second chapter in this project: the deserted Île Sainte-Marguerite, a former prison island now reclaimed by eucalypts and pines, and the ruined Roman city of Tipasa, across the sea in what is now Algeria. There, the ancient necropolis cedes ground to wild olives and parasol pines and to dense patches of prickly pear. Broad-boled trees spread their branches over crumbling tombs; fallen arches open as portals into sacred groves.
There was, Bovo sensed, a “mirror effect” between these two sites, each one home to a forested cemetery facing onto the sea that separates them. In the resulting images, we view those waters stretching off beyond the trees: the sea’s ruffled surface smoothed to silk by long-exposure, or soothed by the passage of time, or both.
Through the branches we also glimpse the firmament above, the sky set aglow with light of mysterious source, and the curving, spectral arcs of satellites in their shifting constellations—those deathless oracles of the modern age. In this way, in these images, human presence is sensed but never seen directly.
The Mediterranean is a lived-in landscape, settled and shaped by man for millennia, as alluded to by the luminous trails left by fishing boats haunting the darkened waters off the shores of Tipasa, the lanterns of the lamparo spun into silver threads by the passage of time. Or, on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, in the stark, sharp stabs of light from aircraft overhead as they descend towards Cannes.
By such ghostly symbology we signal our presence. But so brief it is: as soon as humans arrive in the field of view, they are gone. The head-torched hiker darts away down the path, the flight path flickers out, the fisherfolk ferry back and forth but in the end go home. The dead-eyed stare of the camera captures all that goes on after, in our absence: the long slow hours of silence and stillness and serenity, within which our disruption barely registers.
This is a place as viewed in tree time: measured not in seconds or minutes, but by solar and lunar cycles. In the slow-beating heart of the forest, man is a visitor who—unruly though he might be—does not remain. The photos capture less his disturbance than the continuance of the forest without him, and all its familiars.
For, to the ancient Greeks, those were many. There were the gods of wild places—Artemis and her golden quiver, the red-faced Silenus and his drunken companions. There were the dryads and alseids, oreads and panes. Cloven-hooved Pan, from whom we derive ‘panic’: from the Greek, panikos, the mindless terror that takes over when walking in the forest at night.
It is this forest—far more than the rational forest of daylight hours—that is the forest we recognise in Marie Bovo’s work. This is a world, of sleep and sleeplessness, darkness and dream logic. The nocturnal woodland makes a natural home to Nyx and Thanatos and Erebus and Morpheus.
And Hypnos, of course, bringer of sleep. He who makes his home in the land of dreams, where day and night meet. All lit, one must assume, by a thin and eerie light not so unlike the gleam cast by the full moon across the waters beyond the trees.
Bovo’s previous photographic project Nocturnes summoned too the strange, unsettling atmosphere of the twilit hours, the eeriness of the after-dark. In one series of striking images she presented the night sky as framed by the walls of cours intérieures, the internal courtyards common to Marseille apartment blocks: at the heart of each photograph, the sky presented as square or oblong of a clear, pure tone, as if it opened directly unto the heavens. Only a loose weave of washing lines interrupted the view, forcing us from abstract appreciation and instead into the realm of the real.
In Les Forêts d’Hypnos she goes further, taking the viewer by the hand as she descends into some other dimension—a parallel world in which the forest is the forest and the sea the sea, but in which the wind never blows and the tides never rise.
– Text by Cal Flyn
Marie Bovo lives and works in Marseille. She is a French photographer and video artist whose practice is grounded in the poetic and the political. Working exclusively with natural light, often through long exposures that stretch deep into the night, she transforms familiar landscapes and spaces into something suspended between documentation and dream. She is particularly recognized for her series of nocturnal photographs, where extended exposures imbue scenes with an almost mystical quality. Deeply rooted in place, her work raises geopolitical and social questions through subtle, layered observation. Along railway lines to the domestic interiors of Ghana, from the windows of Algiers to the arctic shoreline of Lofoten, Bovo moves across geographies while remaining anchored in her own rhythm. Her most emblematic series are: Les plages (2003- 2005), Chimères et Transcosmos (2005), Bab-El- Louk (2006-2007), Feu (2007), Cours intérieures (2008-2009), Grisailles (2010), Jours blancs (2012), La Voie de chemin de fer (2012), Alger (2013), En route (2016), Stances (2017), En Suisse - le Palais du Roi (2019), Evening Settings (2019) and La luz o la sombra (2021).
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles; La Chambre, Strasbourg; Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; FRAC Paca and MAC Musée d'art contemporain, Marseille; Institut Français, Madrid; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and Luís Serpa Projectos, Lisbon. The artist has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions at the Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez, Bordeaux; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Maxxi, Rome; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the MAC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille and the Busan Biennale, Korea. In 2016 Marie Bovo was nominated for the ICP Inifinity Awards in New York, for her exhibition "La danse de l'ours" at FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris devoted a solo exhibition to her in 2020 entitled “Nocturnes”, in 2023 she had a solo exhibition "L'Atelier volant" at the ART & ESSAI gallery in Rennes.
In 2026, Marie Bovo is a key figure in the "Réinventer la photographie" (Reinventing Photography) national commission organized by the French Ministry of Culture and the National Center for Visual Arts (Cnap). This initiative, celebrating the bicentenary of photography, features Bovo as one of 15 selected artists tasked with exploring the medium's future.
Cal Flyn is a writer and journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. She is the author of nonfiction books Thicker Than Water (2016) and Islands of Abandonment (2021). The latter won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year prize (UK) and the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing (US); it was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize, among others. In 2024, she received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Since 2025 she has been the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. She has written for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and National Geographic. Her third nonfiction book The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness, will be published in July 2026.
