Marilia DESTOT

Memoryscapes

With Memoryscapes, Marilia Destot develops a singular body of work in which memory, materiality, and landscape converge. Drawn from personal photographic archives accumulated throughout her travels, this series is distinguished by a radical process of transformation: the prints are torn, fragmented, and then painstakingly reassembled by hand. This gesture of destruction and reconstruction lies at the very heart of her visual language. The tears, layered surfaces, and visible scars are not merely formal effects, but become vehicles for a profound reflection on time, memory, and the perception of place.

By moving away from photography’s traditional documentary function, Marilia Destot transforms her images into true objects, situated at the intersection of photography and collage. Her compositions give rise to mental landscapes — unstable, poetic spaces in which different temporal layers coexist. The image is no longer a fixed trace of reality, but a space for projection, constantly being reconfigured. 

Exhibitions

2025

Memoryscapes

Festival Planches Contact, Deauville, France

2024

The Journey, le voyage aux origines

 Segolene Brossette Gallery, Paris

2022

La promesse

 The Blanc gallery, New York

2021

Home of Memory

Rencontres Photographiques de Lorient, Grand Théâtre de Lorient

Biography

Marilia DESTOT is a Franco-American photographer based in New York.

Her work intertwines memory and poetry through landscape and portrait photography. Both autobiographical and fictional, her practice explores photographic archives she has captured around the world over the years. She then undertakes a process of material transformation, tearing, assembling, and recomposing her prints by hand.

The ruptures, scars, and overlapping fragments are not mere alterations, but form the very core of the work’s visual language. By playing with patterns, the contours of the tears, and chromatic variations, the artist intuitively creates her collages — imaginary landscapes where different layers of matter, space, and time appear and disappear. Through fragmentation and manual recomposition, her Memoryscapes become mental territories, sensitive constructions that question the memory of places and their inevitable transformation, as much as the artist’s own photographic memory over time.

Her work has been widely exhibited, awarded, and published in Europe and the United States. In 2025, she took part in the residency and exhibition program of the Planches Contact festival in Deauville and was awarded a grant from the Photo4Food Foundation.

This coming June, her Memoryscapes will be presented as part of the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography.