Sunder the same sky brings together several projects by photographer Florent Mattei in the Metaxu art space. Like the stelae of a memorial, the wandering begins between these shots placed vertically on the ground of men, women and children, whose choreography of the bodies suggests the deaf drama which seems to have surprised these innocent civilians in their daily lives. . Attack, scenes of war or blind violence? Pictures from the series Here between the debris of things and the nothing… quote from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, do not reveal the causes. Of these profane pietà scenes where geographical and temporal markers fade, only these traces of humanity remain which seize the viewer by the proximity established with the subject.
« These ten black and white photos question the question of identification with civilian victims of war “, emphasizes Florent Mattei. ” Around this time, in 2016, I started doing iconographic research on all the conflict images. These images repeat themselves ad nauseam, with recurring scenes. And I stumbled upon a snapshot taken during the Crimean War in 2014, which showed two lying bodies… Europeans. I surprised myself and hated to observe this image with a different empathy because these victims looked like me “, he confesses.
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aesthetics and politics
The same iconographic research nourished the production of the series “ Here under the same sky (2018) which features people brandishing placards with protest slogans freed from their context, photographed from above. ” When Trump was elected, I wondered about the demonstrations that have marked me the most over the past fifteen years and that bear witness to the upheavals of our time. I extracted and isolated symbolic slogans which bear witness to a form of resistance. “Playing at the same time with the archive image while registering in a form of timelessness, the device purifies” these universal messages without attachment, apart from the generic one of their meaning, so that everyone can cling to them and project themselves into them “. Added to this course is the series ” It was a kind of oasis born from a reflection on the theme of homelessness and migration. Performative work produced during a residency in Corsica in 2018, the artist has reproduced a traveling photographic studio, a practice that began at the end of the 19th century.e century, ” thanks to a painted background representing a Mediterranean beach hung on a wooden support, like a mirage sometimes extending the real landscape around “. Like a breath, the fourth series, entitled ” The test of time » (2016) shows the intimate moment of a kiss exchanged by long-term couples, « so as not to reduce the human to his death drive ».
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