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Two exhibition
dal 21/9/2015 al 30/10/2015

Segnalato da

Evelyne Biver



 
calendario eventi  :: 




21/9/2015

Two exhibition

L'espace Photographique Contretype, Bruxelles

David Huguenin present 'The colour of air' a series of photo of landscapes. The photographs of Anne-Sophie Costenoble reveal then even more than they actually are: the listening rooms, directly in tune with the stirrings of the heart, in collusion with bits of light lurking in the darkness.


comunicato stampa

David Huguenin: The colour of air

Notes on a series of photographs.
“Where it would be a question of a vacuum, of dawn and dusk”

In 1995, when I was still a student, I used to spend entire nights wandering through a maze of cranes along the wharves of the port at Sète. I remember a ship called Terpsichore (the muse of dance and mother of the sirens), an enormous cargo vessel whose black prow rocked gently in the dry dock.

In the daytime, I explored the coastal area around the docks at Thau. I was looking, through the jumble of buildings, machines, and abandoned things(unusual places, strewn with the carcasses of old boats, pallets and piles of rotting oysters and mussels), for clues to help me understand how this landscape was laid out, what its structure was. This made me think about the vernacular dimensions of this summary architecture, sometimes arranged around salvaged materials, partially plastered walls and often rudimentary buildings, which nevertheless appeared to relate to some previous, planned use. I would run into oyster-farmers, fishermen and others.

These landscapes were the height of anti-tourism, crossed by ephemeral paths, appearing crude, but bordered and inhabited by the proximity of the sea, and they continued to fascinate me.

A few years later (between 2000 and 2002), I revisited these places, but this time using colour. Once again, I found those strange structures there and I made a catalogue of them. I renewed old contacts and noted the arrival and installation of a new young worker, and the death of an old eccentric. This might seem banal, because this is how things happen everywhere else in the world, in cities as well as in the countryside, down to the tiniest detail. Before dawn and after dusk, these streets and squares are deserted. In the daytime, they are filled with febrile activity and comings-and-goings, and yet people rarely meet here. For there are only workers here, no children, no postmen, no bicycles, but only, which spiced up my reconnaissance visits and my taking of photos, a large number of more-or-less stray dogs, including some beautiful big specimens. I was annoyed, sometimes worried, but I finally had to admit that real life is made up of these minor details. Like an ethnologist on a field trip,
I took no time to replace my old catalogue of cabins by a new list of red dots on the map of places where it would not be a good idea to venture unprepared.

In 2009, after several years of not having taken photos using the “silver” process (I had switched to using digital processes), I still cherished the idea of going back to those places, not knowing what I would be able to produce there, but certain that something was likely to happen. Once again, my approach was a slow protocol, thanks to my use of a photographic darkroom. I conscientiously consulted my archives and, beyond all the series of photos which I could have extracted from them,
I noticed that one detail kept coming back insistently in the images I found most interesting.

This dimension is linked to the quality of the light and its direct consequences on the things it illuminates. And it is more this fine, immaterial side which I analysed, rather than the characteristics or choice of subjects, the composition or the framing of the shot. So I had worked in vain when I had looked for something that could have served as a thread, for nothing else could have existed before renewing the concrete experience of the act and the place. Throughout almost fifteen years, I had noticed on many occasions the unique quality of the light a few moments before dawn and, in counterpoint, at dusk, which was all the more striking when the memory of the morning was still fresh in my mind. It is difficult to put this reality into words, as it is made not of before or after, but of the present and presence. To sum up, I identified something relevant in the dimension of time, obviously objective, but that’s it. (…), David Huguenin, 2015.

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Anne-Sophie Costenoble : The Silence of the Bird

The photographer says to pull open the strip on her latest work with an excerpt from the book Secret Crystallization by Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa: ‘My memories are never permanently deleted as if they had been uprooted. Even though they seem to have disappeared, there are still traces of memory somewhere. Like tiny seeds. If rain falls on them, they sprout forth again. And besides, even if the memories are no longer there, sometimes the heart keeps some traces of them. An earth tremor.’

This is surely the same tremor that pulsates through Anne-Sophie Costenoble’s images. The series ‘The Silence of the Bird’ emerges from emotion and returns there, rising, concentrated. Ordinary and fragile moments, snippets of a story without words (or simply whispered) without noise (or simply muffled, distant), freed from intimacy, a necklace of trinkets that scratch the heart and carry with them a unique poetry, seemingly beyond time.

Where does the impression of literary density in this project emerge from?... Proustian madeleines, childhood memories, loved ones barely touched, objects carrying mute messages, alternating familiarity with strangeness. Faces, grace. No words though, not exactly, but rather the quivering of a confession which completely takes in the entire layering of images. They are addressed to the eye, but speak just as much to the touch, to hearing, to smell ... They call out to be tasted rather than understood.

After studying physiotherapy and art history, Anne-Sophie Costenoble discovered photographic practice slowly, gradually expanding her understanding of the world. Attendance at workshops, crucial encounters (with Françoise Huguier, Jean-François Spricigo, Nicolas Van Brande) led her work along new paths: a member of the Caravan collective and an eager follower of a documentary approach, one has the feeling that the photographer has followed the call of a small and more personal inner voice, one made up of undertones, puzzles brushed by fingertips, introspection, sensuality.

She also came to offer images in the form of installation: shots taken by her or old photographs, preserved but at the same time put at a distance under globes of glass. Two sound projects by Valérie Callewaert (a radio producer) complete the proposal supporting the overall purpose of the exhibition. A fable of muffled sound emanating from one of the seven wedded globes, and in an isolated room, a film made up of images she selected from the series ‘The Silence of the Bird’. Evocation of the imprint of time on the pictures meditation on their emotional impact – whether mental or physical.

The photographs of Anne-Sophie Costenoble reveal then even more than they actually are: the listening rooms, directly in tune with the stirrings of the heart, in collusion with bits of light lurking in the darkness – dustings of fire on the nocturnal icing of memory.

Image: Anne-Sophie Costenoble, Untitled, 2014, 35 x 50 cm

Press contac:
Evelyne Biver, eb.contretype@skynet.be

Opening: 22 September, 18-20 pm

Contretype
4A Cité Fontainas, Bruxelles

IN ARCHIVIO [4]
Two exhibition
dal 21/9/2015 al 30/10/2015

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