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“Les Pionniers,” this barely spoken title evokes in a somewhat provocative way notions that seem from another time: borders, settlers, occupiers, explorers, something like conquest.
But this summer at the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation, we invite you to take a step aside, to change your point of view. We invite you to ask yourself the question: If there are no more Terra Incognita or « great explorers »… who are the real Pioneers today? Human beings have fragmented, monitored, and exploited land, air, and sea spaces. Exit the Terra Incognita, the cards are full. It’s time to reshuffle them! The 6 exhibitions that we are presenting invite you to question our physical, mental, and spiritual limits.
And the times we are currently experiencing lead us to question ourselves intimately.

We want to give voice to men and women who think outside the boundaries of their own limits. Outside of society’s glaringly established norms regarding humanity as the central or most important figure of existence. Or as it relates to the scientific study of human proportionally, mechanically and spiritually. Within our 600 square meters of exhibition space in the heart of the capital of Photography, we bring together photographers, video- graphers, sound designers, activists, individuals, citizens, committed to improving our lives and our relationship to our environment by increasing our knowledge and expanding our individual universes. There is in the fact of re-using the word pioneer a desire to put forward a thirst for knowledge, rather than a desire to reassure oneself and to recognize the world as we know it.
In the exhibitions at the MRO Foundation, humans in front of or behind the cameras, consciously or not, are pioneers and open up paths, ideas and, we hope!, will make you want to find yours. Isn’t being a pioneer trying to understand yourself and assert your uniqueness concerning a group, space, to offer it its own reflection? Understand its difference to donate it and build a set of singularities that are conscious of each other?

Photographers presented: Boris Vian, Wu Cheng-Chang, Mathias Benguigui, Agathe Kalfas, Sylvie Léget, Pablo Ernesto Piovano, Andréa Olga Mantovani.