3 - Lara Tabet and Yasmine Chemali - Vitreous Body

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

Vitreous Body, whose title refers to the transparent, gelatinous substance that fills the eye and enables the perception of light, is a project that extends the photographic practice of Lara Tabet, a medical biologist and transdisciplinary artist. Tracing a personal cartography of the waters she has encountered, Lara Tabet collects samples from port areas, estuaries, artificial basins, and industrialized coastlines. From these sites, she develops an experimental bacteriographic protocol in which aquatic microorganisms interact with photosensitive surfaces. Incubated within the gelatin layer of color film, bacteria and microbes alter its chemistry through processes of corrosion and erosion. The forms that emerge do not depict a landscape; they arise from it. As derivative images, they make microbiological activity visible while bringing to light the environmental, industrial, and political toxicities that traverse these territories. These image ecosystems are translated into contemporary stained glass. The passage from film to glass marks both a material and symbolic transformation: from the living to the mineral, from a fragile trace to a lasting inscription. This displacement situates the image within a long, almost geological timescale, where organic processes, digital translation, and solid matter converge. Historically associated with light and narrative, stained glass becomes, in this context, a critical surface. It filters and diffracts not a sacred scene, but a layered network of fluxes and ecological interdependencies. On the occasion of the Bicentennial of Photography, Vitreous Body affirms the medium’s hybrid nature from its very beginnings, reminding us that the image is inseparable from chemistry, alteration, and agency. Bacteriography thus becomes a tool for environmental storytelling, a way of looking through, and with, the living world. Yasmine Chemali