Les rochers fauves
Pour des jambes d'enfant, le rivage c'est toujours un peu loin. Chaque étape est un jeu, une occasion de se cacher, une branche qui évoque une épée, un rocher à escalader, des pierres qui deviennent des osselets. Chaque halte, où l'on repose ses pieds et s'interroge sur comment faire ses lacets, est une occasion de manger quelques mures, de regarder un papillon, ou de souffler sur une coccinelle pour la voir s’envoler.
Être enfant, c’est s’étonner de presque tout ; rassembler l’imprévu au hasard d’une promenade et aborder le monde par des détails, des lignes de fuite faisant qu’un même chemin est fait de mille parcours où s’ébauchent autant de devenirs singuliers.
La limite ce n'est pas non plus l'horizon. Tout change si vite, les nuages, les couleurs qui tournent du matin jusqu’au soir, la pluie aussi comme une grande herse grise qui vient sans se soucier des hommes. Il n’y a que la porte de l’école ou la lampe et les odeurs de la maison pour se détourner du plein ciel et de ses questions.
Une île pour les enfants, ce sont aussi tous ces visages que l'on connait, des rencontres sans crainte, des noms précis, parfois des sobriquets, qui disent chaque personne et les récits qui permettent à chacun d’avoir une place. Quelques mots qui rassemblent des conversations ni jamais tout à fait entendues ni entièrement ignorées. On sait simplement qu’elles disaient des liens familiaux, pourquoi un champ se nomme comme ceci ou comme cela, et pourquoi on peut faire confiance.
Une île c'est un univers bien à sa place. Un lieu sûr d'où l'on peut regarder venir les vents avec leur bagages de feuilles et mesurer, de génération en génération, l'obstination de l'eau à user le rocher.
Les enfants d'une île éprouvent très tôt ce mélange d'évidences et d'énigmes et le « travail photographique » a consisté à leur permettre d'interroger cet ordinaire qu’à trop le voir on oublie de regarder. De l’éprouver autrement puisque qu'une photo n'est après tout qu'un monde que l’on émiette au gré de ses goûts et de sa mémoire.
Yannick Jaffré, anthropologue
“Insularity is isolation. Islandness is rupture.
A broken link with the rest of the world and therefore a space outside of space, a place outside of time, a naked place, an absolute place. ”
“You feel far away, isolated, and it creates a mental space where the real becomes very porous with the imaginary”
This picture was taken underwater with an old analog camera were used in different exhibitions with several medium. Each one was a new installation where the picture reveal a different meaning. The first one was at the first door of Le Lieu galerie where you have to cross this paper to come inside the exhibition as if you need to cross the sea to come inside the new island territory. At @lehangar, it was printed on transparent glass where you can watch the fishes and the colors from both parts of the wall, revealing its translucent dimension of the water.
“The exhibtion in Galerie Le Lieu in Lorient was the biggest and most creative exhibition we made thanks to the amazing and passionnante team. We wanted to create a journey where the visitor feels the island duality from the white rocks to the dark sea with sounds, films, negatives contact sheet, icônes, stones, films”
“Despite its postcard look, Amorgos island
is one of the poorest and least densely populated of all Greece, but also one of the most fascinating. Under the unspeakable beauty of the lights and landscapes, a difficult, sometimes tragic human condition is hidden.”
“The mystery of this island territory begins with its name, “Amorgos”, which according to some sources comes from the red color of a mineral lichen that used to grow here. But its mystery extends far beyond that: with its jagged relief and its line of ridges emerging from the sea, Amorgos creates a vertigo”
“It is through this prism that he has constructed his documentary story, between legend and reality, a permanent oscillation between mythical and vernacular poetry.”
“My journey to Greece was punctuated by spiritual apparitions”
“Dunes Edition is a publisher that has created a monography called “les rochers fauves” with this series, creating the principle of tracing paper that offers different readings of the same text. Through this game of transparency and opacity, the system translates a kind of island poetry as experienced by the author Gaston Deschamps in the late 19th century and by the photographer Clément Chapillon today.”
“Stavros has always been there. On every trip, I found him in his car, on the road between Aigiali and Langada. On each trip, I have photographed him. Always the same portrait, this look that glares at me in his door frame. He always has the same intensity in his eyes, at the same time soft and rough, full of melancholic sadness”
“The wind has shaped the few surviving trees like human psyches, but do the low stone walls protect them from madness? The 800-meter-high mountains stop the clouds, a drama is always possible, but who will know? Attentive to the apparitions, Clément Chapillon observes with calm the rough simplicity of a people conscious of belonging to the rough and magnificent sphere of the myth.”
“Amorgos creates a vertigo. Its dark silhouette and its mineral character remind us of our condition of human lost in the middle of the water. Its mountains rise to more than 800 meters, they are the highest in the region and hold back the clouds. They create unique lights, sometimes soothing, sometimes threatening, but always mysterious.”
