Objective: to understand how gold-mining companies, farmers, the military, public institutions involved in research and land management (National Forestry Office, Geological and Mining Research Bureau, Directorate-General for Territories and the Sea, French Biodiversity Office), as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, perceive their territory and its underground resources.
Armed with a large-format camera and prepared for long hours of in-situ interviews, project scientists—Fenintsoa Andriamasinoro (BRGM), Laurence Maurice (IRD), Frédéric Piantoni (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne), and PhD student Charlène Roux (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne)—set out to meet isolated communities deep in the tropical forest.
One of the challenges of this mission was reaching populations scattered across a remote, sparsely populated territory. The Paul Isnard track and its many branches form a network of roughly 500 kilometers of tracks, more or less passable, where legal and illegal miners coexist with farmers established on legal or illegal land, alongside government agencies and the army. All share the same space but maintain radically different relationships with the Guianese subsurface—sometimes collaborative, sometimes conflictual.
Understanding the relationship to the subsurface through images: iconology and photography
The uniqueness of this mission lies as much in its object of study as in its method. Alongside traditional interviews, Frédéric Piantoni—co-leader of the humanities work package, with Ottone Scammacca (BRGM)—deployed an unusual tool.
The team’s starting hypothesis: each group of actors produces its own images and narratives to legitimize its actions on the territory. By analyzing these visual productions—their composition, recurring motifs, and omissions—researchers can identify the representations and strategies they embody once recontextualized. They define this as an actor’s “iconological signature.”
This image-based analysis is complemented by photographic series focused on individuals from the various groups. These portraits are taken using a large-format view camera, which sometimes requires a full minute of exposure.
“This is not a quick portrait. The preparation time involves the person—leading them to stage themselves, choose their environment, select objects, and sometimes invite another person to stand with them. It’s a conscious theatricalization of their relationship to the territory"
explains Frédéric Piantoni.
This sensitive, humanities-driven approach is part of a broader methodology developed within GOYAVES using images. Here, art helps break away from fixed approaches and grasp the complexity of the pathways that connect people to the subsurface.
In the context of gold mining, many people have unique and very personal relationships with the forest—far from a uniform perception. Some staged portraits required several hours of walking to reach a location chosen by the participants—evidence that the choice of place is symbolic in the representation of self. A miner photographed in front of his concession does not convey the same message as a farmer posing in his food garden, even though both exploit the same territory.
In short: “Tell me how you represent yourself, and I will tell you how you relate to the subsurface.”
Two weeks, 17 interviews, and a mosaic of relationships to the subsurface
During the two-week mission, the team carried out 17 interviews with individuals from diverse social groups who rely on the land as a means of production. The first two days were devoted to a methodical survey of landscapes and living spaces along the track, with the primary challenge being to build relationships of trust—essential for understanding the complexity of social relations, whose effects are reflected in how the territory is shaped.
Mining camps—where both mine workers and the research team lived—became places of sociability and exchange. This proximity allowed researchers to experience daily constraints firsthand, and to analyze inter-group relationships. This is at the heart of the project’s social sciences component: understanding how actors sharing the same space organize their relationships—sometimes conflictual, sometimes cooperative.
Access to this type of field site requires complex logistics: various motorized vehicles, long hours of walking in difficult conditions, and, above all, building trust with transport actors familiar with the area. The mission benefited from joint scheduling and shared resources with researchers from complementary disciplines (visual studies, geography, hydrobiology, socioeconomics) from different institutions (BRGM, IRD, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne). Multilingual communication was also key to understanding the nuances expressed during interviews. Here, Laurence Maurice’s previous experience in Brazil and Colombia helped establish trust with participants of Brazilian origin.
When images speak as much as words
Once collected, the data—recorded testimonies and co-constructed photographs—enable highly refined qualitative analysis. Researchers do more than compare the current representations of different groups. They also place these images and narratives in a historical perspective, comparing them with visual and textual materials produced in the past by some of the same categories of actors, using archival databases in Cayenne and at the French National Library.
Objective: to measure how discourses about the environment and the subsurface have evolved in this territory exploited since the 19th century.
The PhD research of Charlène Roux—supervised by Frédéric Piantoni and co-supervised by Maxime Boidy (Université Gustave Eiffel)—focuses precisely on this topic. Political iconology is mobilized to understand long-term relationships between actors (from the mid-19th century to today).
The same words and iconographic motifs can have radically different meanings depending on the speaker’s group and the historical context. For example, images meant to represent biodiversity will depict different elements depending on whether they come from legal miners, illegal gold prospectors, the military, the National Forestry Office, or an Indigenous agrarian community.
This reconnaissance and experimental mission belongs to Work Package 2 of GOYAVES, which focuses on identifying, analyzing, and mapping the relationships between Guianese societies and their geology. With six missions of this type planned, the populations encountered recognize the effort to give them a voice and are willing to participate. During this first campaign, they already helped co-construct several scientific questions currently being defined.
Data to Imagine 2040
These data will directly support the work of Work Package 3, coordinated by Fenintsoa Andriamasinoro and Laurence Maurice. Its aim is to co-develop different possible future pathways for relationships between Guianese societies and their subsurface by 2040. The stakes are high, given major challenges such as demographic growth, sustainable economic development, climate change, and biodiversity preservation.
Researchers plan to model these varied representations and make them interact through meta-models capable of integrating all groups’ viewpoints. This qualitative database will then be used to design serious games intended to stimulate dialogue between actors by placing them face-to-face with one another’s representations.
The goal: to enable the co-construction of desirable evolutions in how the subsurface is perceived and valued by 2040.
This work is also connected to the ANTICIP project, which studies the capacity of actors to envision the uncertain future of subsurface resource use. One week after returning from Guiana, both teams met again on 28 October during an interdisciplinary study day organized by ANTICIP: “Future(s) Underground: Interdisciplinary Exploration of Anticipation Methods and Issues.” This meeting helped align methodologies and generate new research pathways.
A science built in the field
The selection of the study site itself revealed the complexity of existing representations. The Paul Isnard track had a negative reputation, linked to assumed danger and its marginal status relative to Cayenne—both physically and socially. Yet the reality encountered on the ground was markedly different, both structurally and materially.
This is an important methodological lesson: the very process of selecting a study site is influenced by representations shaped by the socio-political environment in which decisions are made.
This reflexive perspective on scientific practice in such a context is a core component of the GOYAVES project. Beyond the data collected, the project fosters a reflection on how to conduct science in complex field environments—a science that accepts uncertainty, values encounters as acts of exchange, and recognizes that images are never neutral: they carry representations and, consequently, the strategies of actors in interaction. In the end, images help reveal what is reflected in the modes of subsurface exploitation and the temporalities of its sustainability.
Sur la piste de Paul Isnard du côté de Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni (Guyane) : quand l'image révèle les relations des sociétés guyanaises à leur sous-sol.
© PEPR Sous-sol, bien commun
Sur la piste de Paul Isnard du côté de Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni (Guyane) : quand l'image révèle les relations des sociétés guyanaises à leur sous-sol.
© PEPR Sous-sol, bien commun
Sur la piste de Paul Isnard du côté de Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni (Guyane) : quand l'image révèle les relations des sociétés guyanaises à leur sous-sol.
© PEPR Sous-sol, bien commun
Sur la piste de Paul Isnard du côté de Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni (Guyane) : quand l'image révèle les relations des sociétés guyanaises à leur sous-sol.
© PEPR Sous-sol, bien commun