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Sequence from Livraison, texts by Jean-Pierre Rehm and Zahia Rahmani, Hotel Europa, Filigranes editions.
" Hotel Europa is, first and foremost, the affirmation of a substance: here, rock against rock, there a prow of set stone, Laocoon and his reptiles alone on a square, blocks of flats rising high all around, houses forming layers, strata and jags, zigzagging or straight tarmac roads, etc. With the exception of the very occasional portrait, always outside, and always apparently more bound up with the ensemble and thus making the general rule even moremanifest, the landscape unfolded against its uniformly blue sky by Hotel Europa is wholly governed by the law of petrifaction.
(...)
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And so, in succession and overlapping, there is an "I would prefer not to" offer the detailed account of a journey, "I would prefer not to" travel, "I would prefer not to" be in the centre of a city, "I would prefer not to" undertake a sociological study, "I would prefer not to" let the lens take the people and things hostage, "I would prefer not to" believe in the autonomy of the image (that one, the target image, was sent sinking by the profile of a shooting gallery in a fairground), "I would prefer not to" differentiate between Marseille, Sarajevo and Odessa, under cover of picturesqueness, "I would prefer not to "mix up Marseille, Sarajevo and Odessa, under the pretext of globalisation, "I would prefer not to" forget the past utopias of which signs still linger in the streets, "I would prefer not to" be blind to the effects of time on buildings. Etc.
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As strong as the invisible seism that shakes on their foundations a handful of houses on the edge of a curve, as clear as that movement in which the sea becomes land and a boat a building alongside the quay, this kind of false indecision shakes up the composition of the images, blurs both the attraction of the series and the refusal of narrative. In a word, it undermines delimitations. And here we have a key to the dominant minerality: the unyieldingness of frontiers. Whereas the first series showed the (unlined) exteriority of American landscapes -screens filtering light- Hotel Europa brings before us territories that are just as receptive to broad daylight, but their configurations and obstacles are of another kind; they are zones. "
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