As close as possible to the earth … From October 26 to November 22 at the “Una Volta” cultural center in Bastia
“Photographing is not only making images, it is also, in the luxury of slowness, organizing them, thinking them.
By being entirely involved. When leaving Paris, shortly after May 68, I slipped a beautiful thickness of countryside between the city (any city) and myself. From then on, turning my plastic work towards the question of landscape turned out to be, a dozen years ago, an aesthetic issue but also a powerful ethical one. A real conversion driven by the “magic” of photography but also an act of resistance to a dominant ideology.
On the skin of a country, the landscape, more than ever the bearer of a company’s intentions and decisions, is not a concern for detail. From Corsica (my home port), my approach drifted towards Crete and, lastly, Cyprus. Why this Mediterranean “cruise”? Tourism now weighs more than any other human activity and the mare nostrum remains the world’s leading source. In these three territories with a strong peasant tradition, its sudden growth (linked to a hegemonic mode of development) led to a spectacular relocation of the territory: an unprecedented urban expansion and land speculation with a concomitant decline in agriculture. The landscapes kept, maintained, drawn by human hands since the dawn of time are now, there as elsewhere, in danger. With them, the relationship to the world and to the living.
The island of Cyprus (roughly the same area as Corsica and Crete) therefore puts an end to a trilogy that I wanted to link to “landscapes of little” as we say “people of little”. Their discrediting is not recent. If we observe the photographs of the end of the 19th century brought back (for example) from Cyprus, it is clear that travelers (missioned or not) photographed very little (if not never) ordinary landscapes, cultivated landscapes, even when the Cypriots were peasants and everywhere their life was that of peasants, as declared by a certain W. Hepworth Dixon in 1878. Beyond that, the point of view of most of the missionaries joined that of “country forts ”on a distant and exotic land, interested only in the picturesque, in ruins and monuments, in the strategic and commercial value of the territory and not in the“ masterpieces ”of the peasant.
At the gates of the East, Cyprus is the European country with the richest, the most contrasted, the most difficult history. A textbook case. Since 1974, it has been cut in two by a demarcation line, its very capital, shared by walls and barbed wire. Without underestimating this tear, far from it, I decided to read the island as a whole, crisscrossing the Republic of the North as well as that of the South and even entering the buffer zone controlled by the UN. Without ever seeing the sea, I wanted to testify (as in Corsica and Crete) of another island, an island of earthlings, experienced as a kind of continent in miniature.
Cyprus is a dry island, bruised by the sun. However, I discovered it at the end of an exceptionally rainy winter and an equally watered spring. A historic year. In a tremendous spring revolution, everywhere the deep intentions of the earth were manifested. We could only hear the foam of the plants and the velvety green of the wheat sometimes flowed far below the carob trees. It didn’t matter that the pastoral of blue and yellow was slow to gain the upper hand. In the landscape bay, a breath of light flowing over the horizon, how can you not feel closer to life, not to say right in it? “
Maddalena Rodriguez-Antoniotti
Technical note
To go against the “dream” images of tourism marketing, the artist has deliberately used, just as in Corsica and Crete, the first parts of his trilogy, a modest Voigtländer (Brillant model) of the 6 x 6 reflex type. , dating from 1938.
The photographs were taken without any other lens than a 75 mm (the closest to eye perception, the equivalent of a 50 mm at 24 x 36).
So without filters, without wide angle, without telephoto lens and all the stuff. With vignetting key. No desire to impress. No further laboratory manipulation. A poor art, in short, photography.
Almost 3,000 km have been covered by car (left-hand drive) in all weathers, not to mention the thousands of steps on dirt roads. As usual, the photographer took few photos (25 films of 12 exposures each), without ever duplicating a shot.
The bet was not to deviate from its biases: “old-fashioned” shots, frontal, meticulously composed, fleeing the foreground. But by erecting the sky as the very actor of the landscape, it assumed the risk of crowding out the frames with blocked horizons.
How not to add that, even if this camera did not obey me to the finger and the eye, its personality, its way of diffracting the light, let us say its “hazy hazy” optical air, allowing to “imbue” the images of it. ‘an almost pictorial atmosphere?
The painter thus coming to lend a hand to the “primitive of photography” that Maddalena Rodriguez-Antoniotti likes to be to be…
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