where memory remains |
LE QUADRILATÈ RE |
Ambroise TÉZENAS - Sibylle BERGEMANN - Claude DITYVON - Patrick TOURNEBOEUF - Susan TRANGMAR - Cléa COUDSI & Eric HERBIN - Sophie ZÉNON - Jean-Pierre GILSON
The photographer selected a dozen emblematic places and registered with tour operators to be immersed in the same experience as any other tourist. For the sake of accuracy, he took care to photograph only what visitors could see. From the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944 to the ruins of the 2008 Sichuan Province earthquake in China, Ambroise Tézenas crosses the 20th century, including Cambodia, Rwanda, Ukraine and Lebanon. He draws up an inventory of these organised trips of a new kind, which he summarises in one sentence: "Here, we come to check a nightmare". Born in 1972 in Paris, Ambroise Tézenas graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Vevey (Switzerland) in 1994. Based in London and Paris, he is represented by Galerie Mélanie Rio in Paris. His work is regularly published in the international press and appears in several collective works on the European landscape. |
Sibylle BERGEMANN Das Denkmal (The Monument) Proposed by the CRP / Regional Centre for Photography in Hauts-de-France, from its collection
"In her photographs, Sibylle Bergemann completes reality with her own dreams, making banality poetic. This is linked to her background, the country called GDR, which for various reasons felt obliged to degrade, cleanse, cut and castrate. The hems of the skirts were pulled down and the corners of the mouths pulled up, the broken plaster was retouched, and the bins removed. Throughout these years of orderly optimism, the photographer captured the seriousness of things. Faced with the threatened individuality, she responded with absurdities and sadness. Melancholy as a means of defending the subjective, the individual... the incalculable.” Sibylle Bergemann (1941-2010) was one of the leaders in the revival of German photography. She became a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts after reunification and was one of the co-founders of the OSTKREUZ photography agency alongside Arno Fisher.
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Dityvon captures and shares an atmosphere, a state of mind, an air of liberty that suited him perfectly. He who said, “The street spoke. Me, I speak. And looking is also a way of speaking”, found, without apparent effort, with unequalled fluidity of framing because he does not seek to be demonstrative, a form of urban poetry at those moments of intense confrontation. So Claude Raimond-Dityvon’s May 68 is anything but reportage. It could be described as a chronicle, in the best sense of the term, or a journal, almost a notebook, as if he had been on a trip around a troubled Paris in which he had landed somewhat by chance. No symbolic image, no document to accompany the headlines of the dailies or magazines, no seeking to go down in history. Just a discernible pleasure at having been lucky enough to be there, at that time, and able to capture the images without the constraints getting in the way. He managed to show what is between things, what is not seen and that seems like a music of words and the rustle of the streets, his way of taking t(he pulse. And that is already quite something. Claude Dityvon (1937-2008) won the Niepce prize in 1970 and in 1972 was a cofounder of Agence Viva, which he managed until 1980 with his wife Chris. He left an important body of work on various themes, always with Man as central subject. |
Patrick TOURNEBOEUF Since 2003, Patrick Tournebœuf has devoted part of his work to recording the stigmata of history, through four series: The Scar, on traces of the Berlin Wall, The memory of D-Day, on the Normandy landing beaches, Monolith on the natural disappearance of blockhouses from the coastal landscape, and Steles on the monuments to the dead of the Great War. Born in 1966 in Paris, Patrick Tournebœuf is a member of the collective Tendance Floue. |
Susan TRANGMAR One starts by identifying a place on a map. Then, by driving or walking, a place is arrived at. A first visit takes place with the arrival of spring, fertile and green. The cemeteries appear arbitrarily, dotted within the landscape. Their intimate serenity or exposed, stark brutality can be shocking. Susan Trangmar was born in Brighton. She has worked for many years with the photographic image in a variety of media: still photography, projection installation, moving image and sound. She currently lives and works in London, where she is Reader in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins UAL. In 2016, Susan Trangmar was invited by Diaphane as artist in residence during the centenary of the Battle of the Somme |
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Cléa COUDSI & Éric HERBIN Les soupirants / Chemins sur feuille d’être Suitors / Paths on Leaves of Being During their residency at the Historial de la Grande-Guerre de Péronne, Cléa Coudsi and Éric Herbin picked up tree leaves here and there. Each leaf is the trace of the place where it was picked up, a piece of landscape. On these leaves they used a laser to engrave, like a tattoo, two series of images: one of faces (Paths on Leaves of Being), the other with texts (Suitors). This work was created in 2016-2017 as part of the Paysages en Résonance project, produced by the Historial de la Grande-Guerre de Péronne-Thiepval, with aid from the Regional Directorate of cultural affairs in the region of Hauts-de-France. Cléa Coudsi was born in 1980 and Éric Herbin was born in 1979. They both live and work in Lille. They studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dunkerque, Dijon and Aix-en-Provence, as well as at Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts. They have shared a workspace since 2002. Their works mix video, sound, mechanical installations and photography. www.paysagesenresonance.fr |
Sophie ZÉNON To Live Here (Film 17’12’’) Pour Vivre Ici [To live here], title borrowed from a poem by Paul Eluard, is a film made during a creative residency in 2017 (Abri mémoire, Uffholtz) on the Vosges site of Hartmannswillerkopf (HWK), important First World War site, also called "The Old Armand" or "The Man Eater". It addresses the issue of restoring the memory of a place of conflict during the First World War. The notions of identity and of the frontier run through this project steeped in contemporary history, at a precise moment in our history where Europe is threatened, confronted with the rise of the nationalism and where never in the world have there been so many walls erected between peoples. Born in Seine-Maritime in 1965, Sophie Zénon is represented by the galleries Thessa Herold (Paris), Les Comptoirs Arlésiens (Arles) and Schilt (Netherlands). |
Jean-Pierre GILSON The Aube Front These images are striking in the way they singularly recall the look of the landscapes before the beginning of the combat and massive artillery shelling. Born in 1948 in Compiègne, Jean-Pierre Gilson devotes himself to landscape-oriented art photography. |