Lauriane Miara: “There’s Only One Thing I Wish for Us: To Live in Peace”

In Annecy, the screening has just ended. People are still talking in the aisles—about the film, about those wide shots of Lapland, about that steady voice describing glaciers that keep shrinking. Lauriane Miara sinks a little deeper into her chair, like she’s trying to buy herself a few more seconds out of the spotlight.

Lauriane Miara (right) and her student (left) during a workshop where she teaches how to paint mountains © Vertige Media

With a half-smile, she heads it off before anyone can misread her posture. “I’m sitting way back in this chair,” she says. “Not because I’m trying to look above it all. My back just needs it.” It sounds like a throwaway comment. It isn’t. It already tells you something about her: the reflex to disarm, to explain, to make sure no one thinks she’s “posing.”

Miara—French, a graphic designer and illustrator—has that rare quality where, once you’ve met her, she stays with you. Maybe you can’t name exactly why. But you feel the impression she leaves. The audience in Annecy had just watched L’Art Vivant, her documentary, shown during the most recent Femmes en Montagne festival. On screen, Miara talks about black holes, uprooting, Alpine heat waves, and what she calls the capitalist “hypnosis” of screens, all while tracing the outline of an artist pulled toward big, wild mountain spaces.

The film moves between laavus—open forest shelters in Lapland—and the cables and infrastructure around Bourg-Saint-Maurice, where she lives now. It follows work that looks fragile at first glance, and it asks a bigger question underneath: what place do people like her have in landscapes that are being reshaped, packaged, and wired up? The festival jury thought the film landed with real clarity. They awarded it the Environment Prize.

There’s a small irony in starting our conversation with someone who tells me right away that she hates screens. L’Art Vivant will soon air on Swiss public television (RTS), one of the country’s major broadcasters. She avoids screens because they make her feel physically sick, and yet she’ll have to deal with them. So she reaches for a word that comes up often when people talk about her watercolors: peace. And the calm that seems to rise out of them.

“People talk to me a lot about softness,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘It’s Lauriane’s softness.’ I read it sometimes, too. For me it’s strange, because I don’t feel soft at all. I feel like I’m hard.”

The invisible fight

When Miara describes what she’s lived through, she doesn’t hide behind euphemisms. When she says “black hole,” she means it literally. “There was a time in my life when I fell into a hole,” she says. “Really—a black hole. I don’t have a better image than that. And then I had to climb back out. It’s better now, but I still have this daily fight not to get pulled back into it. It’s like I’m walking on ground full of holes.”

Her words are plain. The meaning is, too. More than once, she leaves space for the hard parts without naming them directly. For her, moving forward is about noticing, anticipating, adjusting—not to “optimize” her life, but to stay upright. “I have to pay attention to how I sleep, what I eat, what I drink, what I consume, my pace, the way I work,” she continues. “I have to watch a lot of things so I don’t fall back in.”

“I have serious sleep problems. I’ve had them, and I still do. But in those environments—no. I sleep well. I can’t really explain it. Maybe it’s feeling the cold, seeing the stars.”

In that work of keeping herself steady, she says her center of gravity sits with other people, far from her own comfort. “In my life, anxiety takes up a huge amount of space,” she says. “It’s invasive. And I really don’t want to pass my anxiety on, out of respect.”

In recent years, talking about mental health has become a constant public expectation—almost a moral rule. With Miara, it reads differently. It feels less like a confession and more like a commitment: don’t let your fear spill into someone else’s life.

Lauriane Miara, in Annecy, November 2025 © Vertige Media

That’s where her art starts to feel thicker than it looks at first glance. From a distance, Miara’s watercolors match what people project onto her: softness, clean lines, delicate palettes, lost cabins, miniature ice floes, silent forests. You could mistake it for another version of slow living turned into an aesthetic.

But when she talks about it, she shifts the whole frame.

“At first, drawing is a refuge, sure,” she says, “because I’m trying to draw things that represent a kind of calm I don’t have access to. So in a way, I’m drawing a fantasy. When I paint, I can be inside that calm. I can almost touch it.”

Green, not walls

In the documentary, you see her in a cabin in Lapland, a candle burning, and then under a laavu—an open shelter that lets the sounds of the night come through. For many people, sleeping like that in winter, deep in the woods, sounds like vulnerability.

For her, it’s the opposite.

“Out there, I sleep well,” she says. “I have serious sleep problems. I’ve had them, and I still do. But in those environments—no. I sleep well. I can’t really explain it. Maybe it’s feeling the cold, seeing the stars. I find it more reassuring than being at home, in a small town, in a small bedroom, in something closed, closed, closed. When I sleep in the mountains or in the forest, it’s even stronger: I feel sheltered. No one’s going to find me. Nothing can happen. Nothing can happen to me. It’s deeply calming.”

“I see more and more lift cables, power lines, all the development,” she says. “It’s taking up more and more space because it’s a valley where there might be snow longer than elsewhere. It’s nightmarish. Even if it’s still wild, it’s like it’s not wild enough for me anymore.”

Everything flips. The closed room becomes the threat; the night outside becomes protection. The cabin, she says, is “sealed,” it “creates a barrier between what’s happening outside and what’s happening inside.” The laavu brings her back into contact with the living world—you hear, you smell, you’re not separated.

That same logic shows up in how she travels. In the film, she drops a line—“Four days on a train goes by pretty fast”—and the room laughs. There’s a shared understanding now that travel time should be crushed down, that you’re supposed to “get there quickly.” Miara argues for the opposite.

“I don’t experience a train trip as being ripped away,” she says. “It’s more like a thread unspooling. It feels gentle. I leave my place on foot, I go to the station—a familiar station—and little by little, the thread of the trip plays out.”

Flying, on the other hand, feels like concentrated violence.

“You’re dropped into a completely unknown environment,” she says, “in a time frame that’s way too short and not natural at all. It’s not the same temperatures, not the same sounds, not the same smells. All of a sudden it’s brutal.”

Behind the usual “train versus plane” debate, she’s talking about something else: whether what your body is sensing can keep pace with what the landscape is becoming. The train gives your mind time to catch up to the movement. The plane cuts from scene to scene like an Instagram story.

At the end of that line is the taiga—the vast northern forest she calls a kind of “mountain of trees.” And then there’s the return, which she says is harder than leaving.

“When we finished filming, at the end of our trip skiing with a pulka sled, I couldn’t talk anymore,” she says. “I was crying. I couldn’t speak because we were about to leave. The truth is, I wanted to go back into the taiga. I felt pretty bad.”

Back in the Alps, watching the wild shrink

Miara lives now in Bourg-Saint-Maurice. She arrived through a love story, and for a while, the place fit. “Not the town itself,” she says, “but the mountains around it. There are wild spaces big enough that you can live there for a few years, at least.”

But the wild is shrinking, and she sees it every day.

“I see more and more lift cables, power lines, all the development,” she says. “It’s taking up more and more space because it’s a valley where there might be snow longer than elsewhere. It’s nightmarish. Even if it’s still wild, it’s like it’s not wild enough for me anymore.”

She doesn’t say it for effect. It lands like a simple fact: her mental health depends, in a very direct way, on being able to be in places that aren’t fully organized by people.

Her first uprooting happened earlier, when she left the rural northeast where she grew up. She doesn’t turn it into a dramatic family story, but she doesn’t downplay it either.

“In that case, it’s uprooting,” she says. “It’s not tearing something apart. It’s uprooting. I planted myself somewhere else. Because I wasn’t okay. There were things I had to get away from just to exist. To exist—or to grow, to develop. That wouldn’t have been possible where I’m from.”

In the film, she gestures at what she went through. She knows it could hurt the people close to her.

“My parents aren’t very curious about what I do,” she says. “They don’t really understand. What I mention briefly in the film is still a huge taboo with them.”

There’s a kind of mutual protection in that: not saying everything, not showing everything, accepting that part of the story stays under the surface. Uprooting, for her, isn’t settling scores. It’s survival.

After the glaciers

That relationship to the wild isn’t only emotional. It shapes her current work, too—especially a collaboration with glaciologist Jean-Baptiste Bosson and the collective Marge Sauvage, focused on post-glacial ecosystems.

“Glaciers are retreating in the Alps. It’s over. They’re going to disappear. That’s done—we know it,” she says. “But behind a glacier, there isn’t nothing. New ecosystems develop. And those spaces need to be protected right away from infrastructure.”

Scientists map out zones, track which species arrive first, return year after year. Miara takes that raw material and turns it into a graphic narrative, scheduled to be published by Actes Sud.

“We want to talk about what we do with wild places in the Alps,” she says. “What are they? How do we describe them? What do we do with them? Do we need to do anything at all? Do they belong to humans? Do we see ourselves as part of the living world—so humans can inhabit those spaces? Or do we see ourselves as a separate species?”

It’s the same set of questions her watercolors have been asking quietly for a long time: is the mountain just a backdrop for our hobbies, or is it something with its own standing? Do we behave like one species among others, or like an owner trying to squeeze value out of everything before the final melt?

“I wish for us to live in peace”

You might assume that with her patience for long travel, her distrust of screens, and her attention to vanishing glaciers, Miara lives outside the digital current.

It’s not that simple. She has a phone, social media, all of it. She uses it to work and communicate. But she’s built a kind of active caution around it.

“I decide when I pick up the phone and go look for information,” she says. “I use it, then I stop for a long time, then I use it when I have to, then I stop again for a long time.”

She talks about stretches when she catches herself spending “way too much time” there. Her body reacts fast.

“I feel disgust really quickly,” she says. “It’s physical—I feel nausea. And that’s when I know I need to step away.”

This isn’t a trendy speech about digital detox. It’s a political diagnosis, in her own words.

“We have to rethink our relationship to time, to family, to how we live our friendships, our loves,” she says. “Because those things are stolen from us by something we don’t name that often. But I think it’s called capitalism. And we can’t just let it happen.”

For Miara, the mountains, drawing, disconnecting—none of it is a niche aesthetic. It’s an attempt not to dissolve.

Against what she calls the “hypnosis” of screens, she claims something simple that almost sounds like a dare in 2025: the right to daydream. She describes it in plain terms—making herself take moments to do nothing, listen to music, let her mind drift “like a dream.” She talks about childhood boredom as an “immense” creative space, and she says, with calm sadness, “I feel like it’s over. Now kids don’t get bored anymore. And that’s dramatic.”

Still, she knows the world’s dysfunction doesn’t hit her personal life in the most direct ways. Because, for her, happiness points outward.

“You can’t really wish much for me, because I have everything,” she says. “My wish is collective. There’s only one thing I wish for us: to live in peace.”

Then, as we’re about to wrap up and turn everything off, she says it again, like she wants it to land.

“If my life stays like this until the end, I’m okay with that,” she says. “Now—yes.”