An original idea de Watermarks Editions
Exhibition produced with the support of the DRAC Grand Est, the Grand Est Region, the City and Eurometropolis of Strasbourg
This exhibition brings together five authors published by Filigranes Éditions who all have in common that they each work on the theme of the family.
Five unique writings that explore this subject from the most intimate to the most universal. Research in the albums for Catherine Poncin, recomposition of a broken family for Rima Samman, intimate story with Laure Vasconi, revelation of a secret with Alexandra Bellamy or even an investigation into her past for Sylvie Hugues. Using archives, texts or interventions on photographic paper, these five stories recompose a puzzle that demonstrates the richness of this theme, which has become a genre in its own right in recent years.
The moment you enter the showroom, when you have put your feet in the center of the octopus-stage, you will summon your own story, you will think of Solange, Saïd, Patou, your uncle number two and the five more. You will think that everything fits together too, that everything is there. That all can be said. Yes. Your stories. Age-old stories of a mother or great-grandfather, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. It's true ? Who told you that ? You can choose earthy words to tell the lineage, to draw up your characters; you can investigate, congratulate yourself on victories that scrape your knees. You can align, one by one, your memories and your anger, when you are told what you have always known. You can document, build your frieze like the schoolboy for whom this visual cue gives the immense feeling of an infinite understanding of the world.
You can tell the families of others, mix blood, love, descent. You can also choose to tell the book by Mauvignier* because it talks a bit about you. The village hall somewhere in Lorraine. Solange who is celebrating her sixtieth birthday and her retirement. His brother, with his leatherette tie and gold brooch. The guests, from behind. VYou don't take care of him. Go sit down. In these stories, it is sometimes Algeria that is told, Iran, Lebanon or the Spain of Franco. You can give lives the breath of epics. These five artists tell all that. These are their five family stories and maybe a little of yours.
Celine Duval
*Laurent Mauvignier, Men, Editions de Minuit
Curator: Céline Duval
The “Bellamy / Bellamy” editorial project is in line with tales, mythologies, stories in which family secrets are omnipresent. It is first of all the photographic work ofAlexandra Bellamy around his family secret, around Claude, Dieter and Mother. But also of Carine and the others. A family secret which surrounds his birth in 1970 and which is revealed to him by his mother, 22 years later. In 2019, with the graphic designer Marion Kueny, the development of an edition begins. The central idea is to create a non-linear narrative that is an equivalent to his experience of secrecy. With this publication, the secret is no longer one. As Marie Robert writes in the afterword of the book "It has become history, imago, images."
The “El Pueblo” project is partly carried out at the Treilles residence. It is an exhibition, a book of texts and photographs (to be published), built to exorcise the demons of the past and to offer an “autonomous” work where the intimate becomes universal. At 12, the life of Sylvie Hughes seesaw. She then lives in Cullera, a village near Valencia, Spain. Returning from a school outing, she is told that her mother has just been killed by her second husband, who works as a policeman. She must then suddenly leave Spain. Added to the pain of mourning is that of exile. From this period of his life, he only has a family album, some yellowed papers and the judgment of the court.
Catherine Poncin, image-by-image photographer, immersed herself in the Orne Departmental Archives on heritage funds such as Lancre – Pasquis – Grignon and associated them with photographs discovered in family albums entrusted by inhabitants . She has drawn compositions from it that bring characters from a bygone era to life. Their family stories still resonate in the memory of the elders through the characters, the architectures, the landscapes that the artist has put into perspective by combining images in diptych. “Par Monts et Vallons” is an exhibition and a book-conversation between Catherine Poncin and Christine Ollier.
Coming from a Lebanese family, Rima Samman is the youngest of three siblings, now all settled abroad. Her brothers live in San Francisco and Dallas, she in Paris. His parents stayed in Lebanon. Since their departure, the family had met twice in thirty-four years: once in Detroit, the other in Dallas. Born from these questions related to the mental constructions of our identity representations, "Love is worn around the neck" seeks to add fictional and phantasmagorical representation to the collective representation of the family group. Rima Samman tells us with joyful ambivalence about our penchant for reinventing and fantasizing about our identities and our origins.
“L'après jour” is a return to images, an inventory, a flow of notes, an editing of archives without chronology and from all sources. A laboratory that crosses research, personal or professional, orders, projects, completed or not and which echoes a daily photographic practice like a road book. Laura Vasconi designed “L'après jour” for an edition; she thought of it as an annotated diary of photographs. The photographs of "Leonard at home" were taken during the confinement from March to May 2020. This series - which is also the subject of a book - echoes this exceptional situation, like an experience that is part of the continuity of the artist's work, nourished by intimacy and the world.
Views of the exhibition © Stimultania and opening on Friday 7.10.22 © Marc Meinau
“Five family stories” was thought up by Filigranes Éditions, first presented in April 2022 at the Espace Photographique du Sauroy, in Paris, revisited here at Stimultania Strasbourg.
FOR FURTHER
