Caldera de Manziana, July 2019
Corps et Arbre, Puy de Dôme, April 2013 – Fôret du Labrador – Rivière Éternité, July 2015
Nature Vive, Courtonne -la-Meurdrac, June 2019 – La peau, Clermont-Ferrand, December 2012 – Composition I et II, Paris, May 2019 – Rose de Jericho, Annecy, June 2019
Kegaska – Lower North Coast, Canada, 2015
Our photographs are “photographic moments”, with moment meant in the sense of mechanics i.e. it is the conjunction between a force and a distance.
These photographic moments are made up of images because the performances take place in front of an objective and in a space in which we seek to converge two sensitive experiences that are irreducible to each other, in public or without public in no man’s lands: being present and making it present.
Presence and representation reveal two irreconcilable points of view and the image as a photographic moment seeks to capture this paradoxical desire.
Presence is the experience of the body in the present, to the point that at the end of the action, we keep a memory of it essentially anchored in our perceptions. The narration that can be made of the unfolding of the action is imprecise, whole parts of what has happened can disappear, so that the other, the one who is in the representation becomes not only the eye that sees and watches, but also the memory of what has been.
It’s therefore not a question of documentary traces of performances, neither of live paintings, but rather of photographic works made in duo. The author cannot be reduced to the one who presses the trigger because here the work is the result of a combined energy of the bodies (that of the performer and that of the photographer) and a distance not only from one to the other but from both in the place the performance interprets.
We confront ourselves with places marked by a special energy: we have taken photographs in the Puy-de-Dôme Forest, Canadian Labrador, Kebun Raya Bogor on the island of Java (National Arboretum of Indonesia). We made other images on the island of Vardø (Far North-East of Norway) where the witches were executed during the inquisition[1], at the Pingualuit Crater in Nunavik…
The place where the performances that are the object of the first triptych we present were carried out, is the “Caldara”[2] of Manziana near Lake Bracciano in Italy. The dark forest that surrounds the Caldara and the presence of the resurgence of sulphurous waters, once considered as emanations of the underground world, are undoubtedly the reasons for the consecration of this place by the Etruscans to Manth, the God of the Hereafter and Hell.
When the sage shows the moon, the fool looks at the finger, according to Jean-Paul Curnier, “This is what allows the fool to realize that the sage has dirty nails.” The artist is this fool who, like Giacometti, “can only understand what he sees by working” in order to “make life more interesting than art” (Filliou).
At a time when society is confusingly trying to get out of the deadlocks in which it has locked itself, our duo is interested in the relationship that our bodies establish with the world around us, animal, plant, mineral, with the ghosts of our memory, indistinctly… The duo is not a subject, nor an object, it is a simple machine, a couple, here a presence AND a representation, not a double point of view, but a duel, contradictory experience, constantly recomposing, readjusting, reconfiguring, accommodating…
Hantu, 27 March 2020
[ 1]Louise Bourgeois and Peter Zumthor erected a memorial dedicated to their rehabilitation.
[ 2]The “Boiler”
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