/ Presented by Dominique Marchès
AILLEURS _ Anne-Marie Filaire

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Anne-Marie Filaire.
Paris , May 2007.

" I have been photographing landscapes for the last 23 years. It is through this subject that I express myself. I am interested in the notion of temporality in the representation of the landscape. I explore psychique temporalities between chronicity and history, and cultural temporalities through the Orient ( Islam in Yémen), and the West through my own culture. This research on the perception of time through its representation in the landscape, lead me to the elaboration of a work on traumatised spaces and on countries involved in a peace process. These scenes constitute geographic spaces which are, for me, the field of my experimentation and of my reflection.

I have been working in what are known as border zones in the Middle East and in South Asia, East Africa and in Europe.

Israel-Palestine
I am writing about a border whose opacity shatters the regard. I am here talking about images, images that I have been taking here, in this place, for over the past few years. Today I question this work, at this moment when the separation is a “fait accompli”, where access into the Territories is becoming more and more difficult. I am thinking of Gaza, inaccessible, and of the feeling of emptiness these images inflict.

Today the image is under control. In the West, after having been overdosed with a flood of continual and orchestrated images, we no longer receive any images from Gaza, from the Territories ( great show of the settlers retreat from Gaza, the destruction of Al Arabia television headquarters in Gaza, work under the Esplanade put ‘on line’).

The first time I came to Jerusalem was in July 1999. It was here that I wanted to begin my Middle East research, in this place where time and space meet. I wanted to learn about the city, independently of any faith or belief in any written text, but as the visual perception of a unique urban order, attempting to feel rather than describe where I was.

At that time I had been invited by the ex director of the Museum of Israel in order to realise a photographic work on Jerusalem. At this time I was also committed to a mission for the Ministry of Environment in France, a Photographic Observatory of the Landscape, which aimed at recording the evolution of landscapes over time and of constituting a fund of archives on national territory.

Impregnated by this approach and by constantly moving in and around Jerusalem, I was able to read, within the landscape, the first signs of the occupation around the city. It was a little more than one year before the beginning of the second Intifada. And then, I moved away from Jerusalem. I needed to see it from a distance, to turn myself away from it. I rented a car and went to Jericho, then Gaza where I stayed alone for three days. From this period, in my photography, the traces mark this distance, this frontier, this period in between possibilities. Gaza was the strongest image, the most frightening, the one that today remains for me the most inaccessible, the most absent and the one which shatters the perception of space and time.

I came back twice in 2004, in March and April and then October, and stayed in total for three and a half months. During this time, in March 2004, I was presenting an exhibition titled “Deserted spaces”at the Al-Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem, an exhibition I presented a few weeks later at the Ein-Harod Museum in Israel. Images of the Eritrean-Ethiopian frontier and of the synagogue in Asmara, a desert, a open and empty space, and a synagogue, an intimate space but just as empty, because Asmara is a city emptied of its Jewish community. This metaphore of the frontier in the exhibition allowed me to enter into a story and to confront experiences, places and people.

2004, the year which witnessed the end of Yasser Arafat’s reign and the construction of the wall, corresponds to an extremely tense period. Contact between populations ceased and I found myself confronted with continual rupture within the landscape. The confinement was materialising in front of my eyes. I worked in movement between people and places, passing from one world to another, I was not trying to represent this confinment, but rather to work within it.

Around this time I had begun to record land around Jerusalem everytime I passed through. It was in this movement that my work was installed. The Exhibition’s passage from Jerusalem to Ein-Harod corresponds to the day after the assasination of Cheikh Ahmed Yassine, the Hamas spiritual leader, in Gaza. This passage for me was violent, emotionally trying, I had the feeling that I would get to one place and lose the other, and had the sensation of not being able to connect thought with (a) movement.

In october 2004, I returned to continue this ground work, and I continued to photograph these places I was moving through, where I was circulating. I photographed as to verify, to conserve time.

I photographed the same places in order to record their movements and their transformations, to find my marks. I installed myself within the time. Producing representations of these landscapes allows their memory to be conserved, in a way allowing them to be thought. Since then, I returned regularly to continue this recording of time and space around these frontier zones.

I have also worked in places, such as, for example Nablus after the last elections which brought Hamas to power, or in Tel Aviv last January. I also worked in South Lebanon in September 2006.

Today the separation is a “fait accompli”. I feel that Jerusalem has lost its flavour and that things have slipped away. I question myself about the continuation of this work. What does it mean ? I felt that the most important thing was to bring the work back here, to give back the images, the landscapes. If the time of the work, its duration, is considered as the elaboration of an emotional structure, it’s also the documentary base of its form that allows the space to remain open.

In Occidental societies, landscapes exist through the representation we have of them, in paintings, then in photography. These landscapes exist thanks to the images. As a photographer, it seemed important to me, essential, to produce images of Palestine’s landscapes. In my photography, the landscape is not a continuation but rather an accumulation. An accumulation of time, of moments. I work at the frontier. The frontier here is something very violent which is being materialised by a wall. The space closes in on itself, and paradoxically, by my turning around myself as I photograph, this space opens up, it unfolds within the image. My images are large bandages , sequences, fictional landscapes which become opaque bands and whose density alters our perception.

The violence done to the landscape alters our vision, perturbs the psychique continuation of a containing space. The form of the work, paradoxically, becomes a containing envelope, a will to continue although faced with the impossibility of being able to think the Other. The documentary aspect questions what these anxieties inflict on our regard and stands as witness to the evolution of these frontier zones, of this confinement. "

AILLEURS
Anne-Marie Filaire

/ Presented by Claire Bresson
WELTSTADT NORDERSTEDT _ Kristine Thiemann

Weltstadt Norderstedt or " Norderstedt, city metropolis ", welcoming nevertheless only 1200 inhabitants by km². Norderstedt in the North of Hamburg, home town of the German photographer Kristine Thiemann.

In the term metropolis, we understand city including important centres of decision, management and transport; an urban pole creating a dynamics of evolution within the society, a certain modernity of civilization as a matter of fact.

Shall we be then amazed to perceive that in the modern city of Norderstedt, a minister makes his office a mobile phone for the hand under a heavenly light, or that ambulance drivers are ready to intervene on the sector of Mac Donalds, or that an assembly of almost bare old men and perched on supermarket trolleys seem to wonder about the nature of the soul with carcasses of cars?

It is the collaboration of three years with the inhabitants that allowed Kristine Thiemann to create of small stages in the well-kept, almost graphic aesthetics, for sometimes comic situations, sometimes in denunciation of a precarious environment. That will become this limp in letters yellow, in the effigy of the public utility of the post office and German telecommunications, which announces by the discreet presence of a red receiver, a partnership deprived of the city " in the service of the technologies and the information society ", but which need not apparently any more the existence of a container of the post office in this precise place?

What can be the future of Autoverwerters Kiesow, pound so legendary in the province of Hamburg? Is it necessary to take imprint as much of this icon H green and yellow of the bus stop, as this shopping bag with the inscription "of jute and not in plastic", object today old-fashioned and not used?

Kristine Thieman looks for to communicate true false information on Norderstedt, whom she claims rich in varieties and in customs evolved.

No, women are not behind their furnaces but doing odd jobs under the radiator calender of Ferrari. Yes, the coeducation of the peoples exists to Norderstedt and we can follow the sports exploit of a family on a golf course. The trainers of the municipal teams of basketballs are in suit during a match and not in tracksuit, and the players get drunk on mutual affection during the warm-up.

Stars in dark glasses stop to the Hotel Norderstedert Hof, and men in hood meet themselves in the twilight in the front of the sex shop Erotic Discount Center.

WELTSTADT NORDERSTEDT
Kristine Thiemann

/ Presented by Sophie Brossais
URBAN ARBORETUM _ Lucas Jodogne

Urban Arboretum is a series of photographs having for object not the tree in parks and arboretums, but the urban tree, this tree in front of which we pass daily and which nevertheless passes unnoticed in front of our glance.

However, it is daily confronted with an environment evolving in a rhythm which exceeds it. Among buildings, electric cables and constantly changeable notice boards, the tree often lives as an uncalled-for presence. The way we treat it doesn't correspond to the romantic image which we have of the tree. The series Urban Arboretum focuses the tree in it diverse functions and in the alienated relation which we maintain with it.

Human being, always in movement, always different, for the photographer the tree is nevertheless an object so sluggish as a still life. The intrinsic characteristics in the subject erase from then on a lot of problems photograph, in particular the problems so typical of the city photography. The tree as object possesses a powerful and varied internal structure, what makes superfluous any stage setting. A tree confines almost at once a space which surrounds it, so as to make evident the centring.

A tree always having the same appearance, of some side as we approach it, the photographer doesn't have to care any more to opt for a frontal or side recording. Released from these constraints, the photographer seems to be able to dedicate himself completely to the purely visual aspect of the representation, to the lighting effects on sheets and on bark, in the set of the shadows, in the texture of the event, in the qualities of the photo paper.

In Lucas Jodogne's work however, it is not these visual characteristics of the tree and the photo that jump in the eye. Quite paradoxically, it is exactly the stage setting, the centring and the position of the objective with regard to the subject that share the speedboat in its photos.

It is not because Lucas Jodogne opted for a well determined system and strictly steady from start to finish, and because he would have applied to a city decoration which, fragmentary, split and chaotic, lends itself to it hardly, often even at all. What it makes, it is to invert the logic which we expect in this project.

To him, it is thus a question well and truly of centring, of staging, of choosing an angle and it according to the landscape; the tree is represented only apparently diverse. This variety - Every tree is photographed in a different way-, is the logical continuation of the drop also logic of the face in the background, the process inherent to the photography of trees in an urban context. This approach of the subject would have been able to reduce the tree to the state of anecdote, by chance gleaned local color. Now, at Lucas Jodogne, such is not the case. Because this artist brings to light above all the integration of the tree in the landscape, contrary to number of contemporaries who thématisent the confrontation between the nature and the culture.

In its work, the tree all around of which everything evolves, is not literally in the center of the image. Lucas Jodogne doesn't photograph trees without more, but trees in their membership in the city landscapes. Henceforth useless, from then on, to clarify the subject of the series: it is the tree itself which changes the whole photo, and it is there that its essential function lives.