L’odeur de la nuit était celle du jasmin

Un barrage contre le Pacifique, L'Eden Cinéma, L'Amant, L'Amant de la Chine du Nord... the words of Marguerite Duras constitute for FLORE a thread that leads her beyond places and times, into an earlier time, that of childhood, of smells, of climates. It is also the time of fiction, the fiction that everyone tells themselves when reading poetry or a novel, or when going back into their family memories. It is from this alchemy of lights and sensations in this humidity that this exhibition was born.

 

FLORE does not seek here to illustrate Duras' works. Nor to put the novelist's writings into images. Certainly not. It is a question of following in the footsteps of a literary and poetic imagination, of continuing a sentimental journey already begun with her previous book Lointains Souvenirs. And if she is inspired by the most famous works that she has read and reread, it is to reinterpret them, to bring them to life in another artistic field. From then on, the landscapes she encounters are superimposed on the mental images she has seen and buried in her memory as an artist. One can speak of melancholy, nostalgia, one can speak a little of what one wants, the work presented here is open and each one will be able to rush into it with its desires and its torments. But behind the ghostly figure of Duras, it is FLORE who appears in the developer of her darkroom. When the image gradually rises, in the shadow of the inactinic light, it is her story that emerges. On the roads of Vietnam and Cambodia, in the rice paddy landscapes, the photographer pursues her personal poetic narrative, this suggested autobiography which has guided her for a long time and which leads us, like a game of tracks, on the shifting banks of her obsessions. For her, it is a question of transmitting what the history of exile means, of telling the story of uprooting, of evoking her own contradictions: how to be attached to a violent country because it is her country, her childhood.

 

The travels that FLORE made, assisted by her companion Adrián Claret, for almost two years, shaped the work. It was necessary to go to the places where Marguerite Duras lived, to follow in her footsteps, to find the clues in the books, in the words, in her writing. This work of investigation is above all a quest. But it quickly escapes to other horizons, other temporalities, other atmospheres...

 

So let yourself be transported to the shores of the Mekong, close your eyes for a few seconds, then open them, and there you are in the world of FLORE.

 

Sylvie Hugues

 

This series was produced as part of the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Photography Prize in partnership with the Académie des beaux-arts.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)