From April to November 2016, the Sioux Indians on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, joined by other nations and activists, set up a camp on the banks of the Missouri River near Lake Oahe to oppose the plan to bury the Access Pipeline under the Dakota River. The people living on the reservation, which is downstream from the lake, fear that leaks might pollute the river. Up to 10,000 people lived in the camp, called Oceti Sakowin, during a standoff with the army and the police in late November 2016. Their protest led President Obama to suspend the project. Then, his successor, Trump, ordered the army to resume building the pipeline. Despite the dismantling of Oceti Sakowin, the Indians’ opposition to the destruction of their “sacred land” did not falter. It took other forms on other fronts. The Water Protectors series (2017 to present) explores this continuously renewed struggle.

About the Author

Born in 1968 in Châtellerault, Bruno Serralongue lives between Paris and Geneva, where he has taught at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design since 2004.
Since the mid-90s, when he finished his studies in Art History at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie in Arles and the Villa Arson in Nice, Serralongue has constructed a body of photographic work that continually up-ends how contemporary media images are produced. Whether confronting the reality of an event with how it is treated in the media, returning to a place after its fifteen minutes of fame have passed or following a story with a different point of view than the usual media focus, Serralongue works within the framework of a certain kind of conceptual photography that seeks to reveal the complexity of reality, rather than trying to exhaust all formal possibilities.