Laura Henno, a finalist for the 2026 Marcel Duchamp Prize, explores reality through a blend of sensory, almost novelistic forms, often intertwining fiction with the subjects she documents. Her work includes fragile adolescents, clandestine migrations in the Comoros and Mayotte, and inhabitants of precarious settlements in the Californian desert. Henno's influences include photographers such as Jeff Wall, Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore, Mitch Epstein, Joel Sternfeld, Taryn Simon, and William Eggleston, all of whom have used the American landscape for social analysis. Born in Croix, in the North, but raised in Lille, Henno grew up in an art-receptive family. Her father studied at Saint-Luc in Belgium before becoming an architect, while her grandmother was a drawer. At 12 years old, Henno developed her first images from old family photographic plates found in her grandmother's former house, capturing a village and faces from the 1920s-1930s. Her first relationship with photography did not immediately manifest as a vocation. Henno followed the visual arts option in high school and secondary school, meeting Yves Brochard, a teacher who later became her first exhibition curator. She continued her path in visual arts at the university, where photography took over from drawing. From the beginning, Henno linked the image to "staging and fiction." She stated that generally, one starts with instant images of what is under one's eyes, then develops staging approaches, but she did the opposite, especially since she was also writing short stories at that time. After three years at La Cambre, in Brussels, Henno entered Fresnoy. Film broadened her perspective, leading to experiments with 16 mm film, staged photographs, and various other forms. Her first models were often teenagers, a period she found interesting for "identity questioning, uncertainty, where one is in becoming." A residency in a hospital service for adolescents in Dunkirk led her to work with young people suffering from anorexia, obesity, or depression, building a narrative far from the realistic approach. Henno learned "constantly to impose herself from the beginning," in a world of art where a woman must "quickly know how to assert herself and avoid traps." During the 2000s, while roaming Dunkirk and Calais, the migration issue emerged, but Henno did not feel ready to tackle it until she stayed in Rome in 2009. There, she discovered signs of clandestine lives in wastelands and abandoned parks, leading her to understand migration through transformation and forms of resistance. This research extended to La Réunion, the Comoros, and Mayotte, notably with the films Koropa, Djo, or Ge Ouryao! Henno does not merely spend a few days on site, emphasizing long-term, immersive work. This method has led her to Slab City, an improbable settlement in the Californian desert. Henno notes that Slab City has been photographed a lot, often in a sensationalist and voyeuristic way, and that Europeans have a fantasized representation of the desert. Upon arriving at Slab City, Henno was confronted with the violence of the territory, the desert, living conditions, the inhabitants, and herself adapting to it. With an American teammate, she rents an old 1970s caravan, installs solar panels and water reserves. During the first stay, she waits three weeks before starting to photograph, allowing time to "blend into the scenery." Over the years, some Slabers adopt her, and she becomes part of the landscape while maintaining awareness of her relative privilege. Henno describes her experience in Mayotte or Slab City as overwhelming, through every pore of her skin, with the sound, smells, voices in the night, silence, noise, chaos. She aims to restore this experience plastically, in a sound or visual way. An intense immersion sometimes requires escaping for a few days, but one keeps "small scars, in every sense of the word," and must protect oneself from dramatic situations and madness. Some characters have died, others have disappeared or left Slab City. From these nine years was born Sonora, a three-screen video installation presented this autumn at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. The installation unfolds in five chapters, where the Slabers meet the displaced from the Great Depression once immortalized by Dorothea Lange, known for the famous Migrant Mother. Henno questions whether her work is documentary or fiction, stating that playing on this ambiguity is not her primary goal. Fiction enriches her proposal, allowing her to move beyond a hard reality while preserving its essence and social strength with metaphysical elements. Social fractures, the conquest of the West, and military power constantly nourish and undermine the American dream, especially at Slab City, where "we deal with people who are real characters, who seem to come out of literature or cinema." Henno's extraordinary world is now in the Musée d'Art Moderne, and she joins the finalists of the Marcel Duchamp Prize. She acknowledges the challenges for female artists, despite new generations being "much more armed," notably thanks to the return of feminist speech. This recognition reinforces an artist who has no interest in rounding corners: "I have never made compromises, although one depends on a market and an art economy. If I did not choose the most bankable themes on earth, I do not regret it. Because what interests me is to question my relationship to the world."