Béatrice Hodent de Broutelles Room, in collaboration with the Musée de l’Armée — Hôtel national des Invalides
As the third recipient of the Musée de l’Armée’s photography residency, Chloe Sharrock constructs a narrative around the remnants of war across the French landscape—the Confrécourt quarries, the Maginot Line and Verdun—and the traces of memory held within the museum’s collections. Moving beyond a strictly documentary approach, she draws on the notion of aftermath—the consequences left in the wake of a catastrophe—to examine the scars buried in the landscape and the material evidence that remains. At a historical remove from the two World Wars, she approaches photography not simply as a means of representing ruins and erasure, but as a ruin in itself: a fragment of a presence that persists. From sky to earth, from the flesh of paper to that of the human body, her gaze shifts between aerial observation images, densely inscribed notebooks and objects patiently crafted by soldiers’ hands.
Playing with shifts in scale and across different periods, and making charcoal rubbings of trees in the “Red Zone” of the haunted forest, Chloe Sharrock’s graphic and photographic interventions strip matter back to its very grain: stone, metal, graphite and silver salts. Her use of fluorographic and pantographic films, traditionally employed for medical and military purposes, acts as a means of revealing latent forms of existence.
Poised between disappearance and remembrance, her organic and dramaturgical works speak of commitment, struggle, sacrifice and hope, like a distant echo of all the wars that have marked human history.
The Musée de l’Armée Photography Residency
Located within the Hôtel national des Invalides in Paris, the Musée de l’Armée is distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach, bringing together history, science and technology, fine arts and society. Since 2022, the Museum has supported contemporary photographic creation through an annual international residency open to a wide range of artistic and documentary practices. Anne-Lise Broyer, Guillaume Herbaut and Chloe Sharrock have each brought a distinctive and personal perspective to the institution and its missions. In December 2026, the Museum will launch its call for applications for the fourth edition of the residency.