September Books

Amélie Lucas-Gary is a writer.

As she was moving, in order to remember the house she was leaving, she began to paint from life, at home, and then in places where she spent time. In this way, between 2020 and 2023, she completed some two hundred small-format gouaches on cardboard. Sixty-four of them are printed here, in a slightly smaller format than the original works.

The photograms and videos were shot between December 2022 and September 2023 using the clothes my mother left behind five years ago. Rebekka Deubner.

"What's left of you?

Your lonely clothes give substance to the ambivalence of your new condition. Death is absence, the fabric is presence. Death is presence, the fabric of death is absence. At the crossroads of your fabrics my body knows what it feels, feels that it knows: your clothes say that you are no longer here but that you were once here, my body says that you are no longer here but that you are still here.
The material of your fabrics is a forest.

Extract from the afterword What the fabric does to me by Juliette Rousseau

"There is religious bread that is blessed, social bread that is put on the table, political bread that provokes revolts, tourist bread that is carried under the arm, gastronomic bread that is prepared in a thousand ways. Bread is more a bearer of meaning than of knowledge." Marie Astier, What bread do we want?, Edition du Seuil, September 2016

The book Notre pain quotidien (litteraly: Our Daily Bread) is presented as a lacunar and subjective encyclopedia of bread, which reports on its presence in our lives and its political, social, economic, and aesthetic developments. Organized in visual plates, it unfolds a collective memory around this staple food, going from its manufacture to its most derived uses.

For 19 years (1981-2000), ordinary women, most of them mothers, occupied a military base and set up the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. They fought hard, peacefully, and unisex, against the installation of nuclear missiles by the United States, right here in England.

In order to mobilize the population to their cause, they imagined many actions, performances, production of objects. They took the habit of singing in resistance to the police, and more generally to the "world of domination", for the preservation of future generations, the hope of peace, the protection of humanity, and the respect of nature.

The collages were made from archive images of the struggle, with a chisel, in order to evacuate any form of oppression and to reveal the language of bodies, of gestures, tender and united. To show what links, rather than what separates.

Like a mask with two faces, the artistic practices of Pauline Hisbacq and Marie Quéau come together in the exploration of fantasy and the shifting meanings of the same story, nostalgic and intimate in the case of one, darker and more carnal in the other. Drawing on the field of interpretation and the dreamlike quality evoked by the semantics of the exquisite corpse, the two iconographic artists have constructed a personal dialogue through a precise device, where each image is chosen by one in response to the other. Unfolding little by little the visual language of their inner worlds, mixing lost love, dark romanticism and deviant desires, these associations of photographs question the symbolic and necessarily subjective resonances associated with the image.

Imagined in situ by Pauline Hisbacq and Marie Quéau, "Cadavre exquis" was an installation by the two artists presented at the BAL during the Rolling Paper festival in 2019 and which took the opposite of the surrealist game of the same name.

It all starts with the hand. The origin of the gesture of help, assistance but also all the others merge with the origins of man. The artist has created his encyclopedia of postures, devoid of their practicality. The hands are right there, hanging in the mesh of the weft of these old images. The archive is an excess of meaning, says Arlette Farge, where whoever reads it feels beauty, stupor and a certain emotional jolt.
Le premier geste presents a large part of Amandine Freyd’s collection of hands. These come from the archives of an ancient encyclopedia of first aid and medicine.

"Palms of hands, outstretched hands, hands that shake others, hands that slip through hair, hands that smoke, happy hands, wandering hands, hands that wash their hands, desk pads, hands that are two fingers away from, hands that take the pressure off, hands that caress snakes, sets of hands, right hands, two left hands, handrails." Virginie Huet, extract from the afterword.

Let's Sketch the Lay of the Land draws together encountered forms, surfaces and assemblages. The images are both peripheral and intimate, alluding to the seer and seen, mapping the photographer's own wonderings within structures of order and chance. In this, pairings and associations are found in skin and grass, mark making and fallen trees, open fires and shaded vistas. The gathering together of these observations for the printed page forms an exchange and dialogue between partially visible photograph's, creating work that isn't about one image but, a union of images. 

 

Special edition with an original print made by the artist. 

Let's Sketch the Lay of the Land draws together encountered forms, surfaces and assemblages. The images are both peripheral and intimate, alluding to the seer and seen, mapping the photographer's own wonderings within structures of order and chance. In this, pairings and associations are found in skin and grass, mark making and fallen trees, open fires and shaded vistas. The gathering together of these observations for the printed page forms an exchange and dialogue between partially visible photograph's, creating work that isn't about one image but, a union of images. 

In 2018, after a long hiatus, Louis Gary rediscovered the photographic medium while on a 6-month trip to
the end of the world, in Wellington, New Zealand. 

This change of scenery leads him to understand his new situation through photography: an artist who sees
new plants, takes his daughter to school, looks at his wife, tries to tinker, and arrange his finds.

"Ici" is told like a found photo album, a research notebook and a family fiction.  

"We can fix us. This is now a truism no longer antiquated by the historicism of spirituality. You no longer need flee the bargain that you protracted at birth like so many measles and mumps to the contrary of this vaccination, YOU are the now. YOU are the antidote to your fears. YOU can build yourself anew. Let us consume the NEW. Let us disregard the discrepancy of YOUTH. Let us rejoice in a new AGE and a new awareness of SELF. YOU are the means to an ever-lasting version of YOU plugged in, booting and charismatically recalled from the scrapheap and latex of your memories. Without YOU, there is no US and we benefit from your approval. Consider our offer as a testament to YOUR value. You are NOW. Welcome, this is YOUR handbook to better Living." Brad Feuerhelm, afterword (extract)

"Nos nostalgies is not a scholarly treatise, nor a Perecquian attempt at exhaustion of a subject, but an interrogative mosaic about the contours of our youth, our own children, and the way each one invents his way of life, between social influences and singular genius. "
Fabien Ribery, L'intervalle

Nos nostalgies is an extra edition to the 4th part of the exhibition YOUNG at the Platform of Dunkirk.
It brings together images of Nicolas Cabos, Joseph Charroy, Martine Dawson, Rebekka Deubner, Bérangère Fromont, Pauline Hisbacq, Maira Marques Coutinho, Melchior Tersen and Camille Vivier.

 

"The Handbook project is a poetic cartography of sites dedicated to research. In such places, the functioning of our environment, of nature and of our body is measured and analysed for further understanding. In this project, I  focus on do-it-yourself gestures and on the modeling of reality performed by researchers. Therefore, I have depicted contemporary research (public, private and civic) and what forebodes our future. Through a non-linear narration allowing me to transition from trivial to complex or even absurd subjects, this body of work tells the story of life. In a world where seasons no longer exist and where many people are no longer interested in what is inside objects, our environment seems very disconnected from the world of knowledge and from how it came into being. This work thus comes from the desire to better understand how our environment is studied and created." M. Q.

"Summer 2015. I spend a few days in a village in Latvia.The forest is everywhere, the population rare, the plants are invasive and venomous. I meet a group of teenagers, ghostly presence in this rough landscape frozen in the past. I ask them to make pictures with me. We stay together for a few hours. Aïva, one of the girls in the gang spontaneously tells me stories about the village, stories of ghosts and haunted houses. "I'm not scared of anything, I'm afraid of ghosts," she tells me. In this relatively inhospitable environment, life seems to fade slowly, without disappearing completely. " Bérangère Fromont

Collection of images collected on the internet. Here put in relation by affinities, shocks, they traverse the questions of desire, fantasies, eroticism, like a flirtation, where often the imaginary feeds images.

Fanzine made on the occasion of the exhibition "Jeune" at the Galerie du Crous in Paris during PhotoSaintGermain and CACN Nîmes, on a proposal by Rebekka Deubner and Pauline Hisbacq. With images of Joseph Charroy, Martine Dawson, Rebekka Deubner, Bérangère Fromont, Pauline Hisbacq, Melchior Tersen and Camille Vivier, many variations on youth...

Rebekka Deubner sketches with this edition a very personal approach to the myth of Amaterasu, goddess of the sun who is said that after a conflict she took refuge in a cave, thus depriving the world of light. It is this moment of nocturnal latency, wet and swarming, that the photographs describe in as many fragments of a vast motionless picture, never seen in its totality. The landscape of the lost traveler, the sea-bed diver perceived by flash and revealed by the blinding light of the flashlight is revealed to us in expressionist snatches, inviting the viewer to share this inner journey. Les Aqueuses, liquid moods, black or shiny, crossing our bodies. Les Aqueuses, imaginary beings populating rivers, rivers and oceans.

Tomorrow Never Knows is a dive into a fantasy night world, at the limit of the fantastic, in an industrial landscape where a few fellow travelers slip, like the specters of our imagination. The serie is constructed as a narrative, a hallucinatory journey, both amazed and frightened. Tomorrow Never Knows is the second part of a trilogy on the changing neighborhood of the 13th district of Paris, at night.

This work records the return of Oliver Clément in the territories of his childhood in the East of France. In this post-industrial and devitalized environment, there is a deep sadness when the light of day is weak. In these landscapes, it seems to reign a dilated and continuous present, similar to a standing wave. Where one could read a form of disenchantment is nevertheless nested a disciplinary romanticism, sluggish, an atmospheric distance between the world and things. These few monochrome images, equivalent to a daily seismography, are born from this meeting and are inspired by the monotonous imagery of the old scientific publications, the dull office environments and the new musical wave.

Broadcasting issues of the 1980 Olympics, the images unfold a narrative around the character of Natalya, on a background of sports competition. The language of the body, the gravity of the faces, the ambiguity of the postures makes it possible to imagine the adolescent dramas of these gymnasts. Tight shots, off-camera, lead to the closest of an underground intimacy. The editing by shocks and sequences continues the idea of a story with holes. Pixelization asserts a faulty and nostalgic memory, necessarily disturbing and fictional. Natalya is a pure photographic work, even as it develops here in a pre-existing stream of archive images.

The book is composed of 24 abstract photographs. This series was made during nocturnal walks in the XIIIth arrondissement of Paris, changing neighborhood, deserted at night. Halfway between street photography and pictorial art, the ambition is above all plastic: to question the limits of figuration, the indiciality of the medium for, in the end, seek to transcribe sensations (from the Greek αίσθησισ / Aisthesis).