Sand of noises
France – Senlis
A hand grasping the stone, a lava rock; taken in close-up, the hand clutches its rocky gangue as if to tear it away, extract its juices or caress it: this black-and-white photograph taken on the shores of Mount Etna in Sicily speaks volumes about the work undertaken by the Sand of noises artist duo composed of Marie Hervé (1996) and Elsa Martinez (1994).
A work on the trace that resembles a voyage, or rather a wandering, since the two artists refer to themselves as “wandering photographers”. An archeological and dreamlike wandering that began several years ago in the Mediterranean basin, during explorations and residencies, gave rise to a collection of images taken in situ as well as from old documents.
Like an archaeologist unearthing pottery shards, these snippets of images, transformed by complex printing and colorization processes, are displayed in the exhibition spaces like palimpsests, resurrecting and echoing the “sounds” of the sand and ancestral stones of this mythological land. In Island #1, for example, photographs of a rocky shoreline have been silk-screened onto pieces of marble unearthed from an abandoned quarry…
A chaotic, poetic imprint of time is also visible in Rebuilt-Athens (inkjet print on rice paper), which shows us the makeshift restorations carried out on ancient capitals. These capitals, like the statues in their Monologue pour une pierre series (risoprint, 2021), have also been colorized.
Wandering photography
An exploration of “figures of ruin” and a reappropriation – or, in their own words, a “[reconstruction] on an already existing form” – echoing “an exploration of borderline spaces”. Limit spaces” as boundaries delimiting territories, but also as tangled sequences of memory oscillating between truth and falsehood, historical fact and myth, reality and fantasy… It is to open the door to this imaginary world that the young duo play with scale, disproportion and fragmentation.
While Seuil #1 #2 #3 unfolds in three parts the fascinating landscape of the “ghost islands” photographed at night during a sea crossing between the port of Marseille and Ajaccio, on a roll of rice paper in order to “give an account of this displacement and this moving vision of space”, La Notte presents the close-up image, fragmented in two, of a piece of rock photographed at night on the Corsican coastline.
An “isolated extract of matter” like the rocks in the Isola series, the image aims to make us lose our bearings so that we can give free rein to our imagination. « …] isola is the island, but above all refers to the photographic gesture of isolating to the point of erasing all geographical, temporal and contextual references. Visitors often describe these images as aerial views, or conversely, as photographs taken through a microscope. It is precisely this loss of information that creates the possibilitý of continually inventing the image [… « .
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
Marie Hervé, Elsa Martinez – Je me suis approchée d’une pierre, je l’ai écoutée me parler
Fondation Francès / Galerie Françoise
27, rue Saint-Pierre, 60300 Senlis
Until September 2nd
Graduates of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, Marie Hervé and Elsa Martinez have been working as a duo since 2020. Exploring the materiality of photography and the printed object, they are co-founders of the MYTO publishing house and the UltraViolet risography workshop (Marseille). They won the Eurazéo grant in 2020 for their project exploring the Mediterranean space “building a constantly evolving personal archive”, which began in Palermo in 2020.