Public meeting with Alain Willaume
“A Haunted Reality” in partnership with Le Lieu Documentaire (projections)
The exhibition is supported by Stimultania in Strasbourg, co-produced with the Hôtel Fontfreyde in Clermont-Ferrand, Lumière d'Encre in Céret, the Carré d'Art in Chartres de Bretagne and the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, presented as part of the Villa Kujoyama post-residency program, with the support of the Institut français, the Institut français du Japon and the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation. With technical support from Fujifilm France.
Circulation de l’exposition au sein du réseau Diagonal :
Été 2026 : Stimultania à Strasbourg
Printemps 2027 : Lumière d’Encre à Céret
Automne 2027: l’Hôtel Fontfreyde à Clermont-Ferrand
Printemps 2028 : Carré d’Art à Chartres de Bretagne
L’ensemble de la série est publié aux éditions de l’Atelier EXB avec le soutien de la Fondation franco-japonaise Sasakawa et de Nippon Express France.
A member of the Tendance Floue collective, Alain Willaume develops, on the fringes of the dominant documentary trends, a body of work made up of enigmatic images that tell the story of the tension and vulnerability of the world and the humans who inhabit it.
During his residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, he confronted the uncertain notions of wabi and sabi with the light of the Japanese winter. NO SUN. BUT FIRE, the photographic series born from this stay, depicts the territory of a wavering 21st century and traverses the feverish meanders of a “sunless” Japan. This work on emptiness and beauty, punctuated by enigmatic silhouettes, is fueled by the trembling of certainties, in the waves of a mysterious telluric power.
Un intriguant boro d’enfant, acquis sur un marché aux puces de Kyoto, accompagnera les expositions.
NO SUN. BUT FIRE is the result of the work that Alain Willaume undertook during the winter of 2024 during his residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto.
Built around an enigmatic and poignant child's jacket, NO SUN. BUT FIRE is composed of landscapes marked by faults and tremors, punctuated by enigmatic silhouettes – oracles? lookouts? survivors?
Ce Winterreise encircles, in the meanders of a twilight Japan, the territory of a flickering 21st century. On the margins of a mental but undoubtedly real territory, it is in the folds of the low winter lights that the flickering of certainties lies in wait. This work on the gap feeds on the blurred waves of a telluric power carrying disasters and age-old myths.
The result of a collection of clues, mirages and facts, the composite portrait of a country-abyss emerges from the shadows, beauty and formless material of reality. This series of images, edited like an imaginary film, awakens to the existence of unspeakable, distant and yet familiar notions such as this small boro whose disturbing power and extreme fragility evoke in a single impulse the cold, the catastrophe and the most extreme destitution but also the love carried by generations of darning mothers who have thus been able to preserve a little comfort for their child.
Gone in pursuit of an elusive chimera (the photographic representation of the concepts of wabi and sabi) Alain Willaume paints a melancholic portrait of a harsh country, prey to earth tremors and the incessant wavering of certainties.
Between enigmas, flashes of brilliance or a sense of catastrophe, the images of NO SUN. BUT FIRE sketch an atlas of uncertainties that opens a gap echoing immateriality. wabi-sabi,The recent earthquakes that took place in Japan during the photographer's stay seem to have affected the very "skin" of these images and revived the feeling of vulnerability that the blindness of the Anthropocene still tries to mask... The uneasy shadow of the world to come remains and the perspective wabi-sabi, invites us to confront the paradox of the beauty of imperfection. The photographer's work is knowingly inhabited by semantic ambiguities, shifts in form and meaning, and formal imperfections. This awareness of the distance from reality and his attraction to shadow could perhaps summarize both his artistic approach and explain his attraction to this "blurred zone" conducive to questioning, which does not hinder knowledge but, on the contrary, broadens it.
NO SUN. BUT FIRE, 2024 © Alain Willaume / Collectif Tendance Floue
1 the term boron (literally, rag in Japanese) originally referred to a piece of fabric or clothing that was very worn and patched, sometimes over several generations, by poor farmers in Aomori Prefecture. This “tradition,” once a symbol of extreme poverty, was rediscovered in the 60s by ethnologist Chuzaburo Tanaka, who began collecting them.
2 wabi-sabi, are Japanese terms for an aesthetic concept, or a spiritual disposition, derived from Zen Buddhist principles, as well as Taoism. They have two meanings that could be simplified as follows: wabi (the alteration by time, the decrepitude of beings and things, the patina of objects, the taste for worn things, etc.) and sabi (solitude, simplicity, melancholy, nature, sadness, asymmetry, etc.). Wabi refers to the feeling towards things in which one can detect the work of time or men and sabi to the modesty one can feel towards natural phenomena.
Alain Willaume, born in 1956, is an independent photographer and author, member of the collective Blurred Trend since 2010. His artistic approach is similar to a “personal cartography” shaped by his extensive travels, particularly to India, where he went in 1979 and lived from 1999 to 2003. Deeply haunted by reality, his work questions the violence and vulnerability of the world and the beings who inhabit it. He does not consider fiction as opposed to reality, but as an alternative modality—a combination of commitment and mystery—whose strength lies in the sobriety and taciturn intensity of his images.