At first, it's a treasure hunt. A path blazed in a world of unknowns. The Jeu de Paume offers us the discovery of a work: a collection of works by Véronique Caye, represented by the Analix Forever Gallery, which follows in the footsteps of a father on the other side of the world.

“My skin is a landscape”: this sentence opens Polynesia 66, the travel journal created by Véronique Caye between December 2024 and January 2026. Following in the footsteps of her father, Emmanuel Caye, sent in 1966 to the Reao atoll as a veterinarian during his military service, the artist travels to French Polynesia to explore a family history that intersects with that of the French nuclear tests conducted the same year in the Pacific.

Using private and administrative archives, photographs, films, and first-person narratives, Polynesia 66 takes the form of an investigation where family memory and contemporary history intertwine. Véronique Caye explores the connections between her father's time in Polynesia and the marks left by time on their respective bodies. Skin is memory, then doubt, like the landscape.

The light of Polynesia, filmed today, engages in a dialogue with documents from the past and reveals the coexistence of several narratives : that of an imaginary paradise, that of a long-hidden nuclear history, and that of a daughter seeking to understand what connects her to her father. Through this sensitive journey through places, archives, and generations, Polynesia 66 is in search of an image so true that one believes one sees one's own life in it.

LE JEU DE PAUME
Until September 17, 2026
Online - Free

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