Benjamin Pothier, elected in 2018 "International Fellow" of the prestigious Explorers Club (founded in 1904 in New York and which counts among its members Elon Musk, Buzz Aldrin, Thomas Pesquet and director James Cameron), is a multidisciplinary artist, explorer, director, photojournalist and French researcher specializing in the study of human performance in environments described by NASA as "I.C.E." [Isolated, Confined and Extreme].
First Frenchman selected for "The Arctic Circle Residency" in the Arctic Ocean and Svalbard up to 20 degrees from the North Pole in 2013, he is a graduate (PhD) of the interdisciplinary and international artistic doctoral program of the Planetary Collegium (Plymouth University) under the direction of the British artist and theorist Roy Ascott, one of the pioneers of projects mixing Arts and Sciences since the 60s.
He has participated in extreme expeditions in the Arctic Circle, on active volcanoes, in the world's most arid desert and at very high altitudes. Selected in 2018 by the European Space Agency as an analogue astronaut for the EMMIHS-1 mission in Hawaii, after testing a NASA suit on an active volcano in Iceland in 2019 and participating in February 2021 as Mission Commander of a simulated lunar mission on the LunAres habitat in Poland, he will participate in a simulated Martian mission in November 2021 in the Moab desert in Utah.
His work as a photographer combines documentary aspects with a research in plastic photography and a marked interest in the vernacular and the ready-made. His work has been exhibited in collaboration with the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Paris at the Maison de la Norvège in Paris and at the Kalashnikov Gallery in Johannesburg in collaboration with the French Embassy in South Africa. He is regularly published in the international press (La Stampa, Libération, The Telegraph, BeingHunted Magazine, The Daily mail, etc.. )