| | | | | | | | | Marie Sommer: L’œil et la glace, 2021 | | | 8th edition of the European Month of Photography in Luxembourg - "ARCHIPEL" | | | | www.emoplux.lu | | | Marie Sommer » L’Œil et la Glace
24 April – 29 August 2021
CNA Centre national de l'audiovisuel
Rozafa Elshan » "Synthèse d’une excursion"
24 April – 13 June 2021
Centre d’art Dominique Lang
Marie Capesius » "HELIOPOLIS"
24 April – 13 June 2021
Centre d’art Nei Liicht | | | | | | The European Month of Photography Luxembourg (biennial) LUXEMBOURG CITY, CLERVAUX, DUDELANGE, ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE
www.emoplux.lu | |
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Marie Sommer: L’œil et la glace, 2021 | | | | | | L’Œil et la Glace | | | | 24 April – 29 August 2021 | | | | | | CNA Centre national de l'audiovisuel 1b, rue du Centenaire . L-3475 Dudelange
T +352-522424-1
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www.cna.lu
Wed-Sun 12-6pm | |
| | | | | | | | | | Marie Sommer: L’œil et la glace, 2021 | | | | | | "L’œil et la glace", continues an investigation into Cold War archive-sites that Marie Sommer initiated in 2018 at the Stasi in Berlin. This installation explores the remnants of the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning Line), a defence system set up across the North of Canada to detect any potential invasions of North America by the Soviets. This long-range radar and communications line traces a magnetic frontier across the Arctic territory from west to east. Of the many stations built between 1954 and 1956, most were subsequently abandoned, but never dismantled. Deteriorated by time and weather, these sites constitute a veritable archive whose historicity is circumscribed deep within a conflict played out far from the public eye.
The installation is made up of three parts: a film projected on two screens, printed photographs drawn from Canadian and US archives with the cartographic data of all the sites, and an object-table featuring the architectural elements of the radar systems. The title of the installation makes reference to two key geopolitical challenges of the Cold War: long-range detection (the eye) and the conquest of the North (the ice).
The film was shot in the vicinity of Tuktoyaktuk a few hundred kilometres from the station code named BAR-3, located at a latitude of 69° 26′ 35″ north and a longitude of 132° 59′ 55″ west. Unable to reach the site due to early ice melting, Marie Sommer points her camera instead towards this natural environment in transition and captures the effects of climate change upon it. Shot in 16mm, the film is neither documentary nor narrative. It is however abstract and displays its inherent analogic materiality: the editing alternates short sequences of landscapes with close-up shots that reveal the unique texture of the ice and random bursts of light that alter the very surface of the film, which seems at times to be on the point of disintegrating.
This dematerialization accentuates the melting of the ice and echoes the decay of the military sites shown in the archive photographs. By way of juxtaposition, these photographs bring into contrast two phases of the conflict: the sites at the time of their coming into operation, revealing the coldness of their technology, and the now disused sites whose vestiges divulge the especially precarious nature of their architecture. Designed in the emergency of potential threat and under extreme conditions, the radar stations radars of the DEW Line were doomed to obsolescence from the very start due to the very rapid development of surveillance technologies during this critical period of the Cold War.
In several photographs, the radar installations stand majestic, yet their monumentality has something ghostly about it, as if the future they were foreshadowing had somehow frozen in the past. Yet this retro-futurist atmosphere, that the comparison of the photographs allows us to glimpse, still contains an idea of progress, despite the desuetude that reigns there. Thus these archive-places bear witness to a new temporality that the Cold War introduces and which L’œil et la glace questions: a pre-digital epoch, where the transition between an analogic surveillance technology that requires human presence and an entirely computerized, remotely operated, digital technology is played out. The aim of showing the desuetude of these Cold War architectures, as L’œil et la glace does, is not to speak of the end of a conflict, but to lay bare the planned obsolescence of which they are the material relics.
Text by Marie Fraser | | | | | | L’Œil et la Glace is part of the work by the interdisciplinary research group "Archiver le présent: Imaginaire de l’exhaustivité dans les productions culturelles contemporaines" at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)
Marie Sommer is a visual artist, photographer and videographer. Her work focuses on the relation and links between places and archives. After training at the School of Decorative Arts, and at the Arles School of Photography, she published her works Teufelsberg in 2010 (Filigranes / LE BAL), Surfaces in 2015 (BilbaoArte) and Une île in 2020 (Filigranes) in collaboration with the author JeanYves Jouannais. She was a resident at Casa Velázquez in Madrid, at the Centre Photographique d’Ile de France and at the Cité internationale des Arts. Her work has been presented in exhibitions by various institutions including: Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, Centre Culturel de Rentilly, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, and the Kyoto Art Center. She is currently a research artist at Figura, Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire de l’Université du Québec at the University of Quebec in Montreal, in partnership with the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts contemporains. | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Rozafa Elshan: "Synthèse d’une excursion" | | | | | | Synthèse d’une excursion | | | | 24 April – 13 June 2021 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Rozafa Elshan: "Synthèse d’une excursion" | | | | | | À toi beaucoup t, (0000.....) 5fois infiniment fois n était exeloús. You unworked your demonstration, contained in a box and you rubbed it against the skin of this place of passage, to disorient (yourself), to measure space, a duration (with the precision of a seismograph), you attempted a more attentive form of the everyday. – This everyday exeloús, of our times.
To demonstrate, you said, by trying a whole bunch of things: the photographic trace, infinite reproduction by photocopy, the drawing out of an instant in its repetition, the distribution of time in the form of numbered tickets, the colour red, the camera viewpoint, the chance articulations of a found list of films, the vision device composed of different sized glass plates, the pacing out of a space and its constraints, the sounds of their unbecoming. To demonstrate so as to experience and inform a quest, to possibly manifest it, in a station waiting room.
(In brackets: in the station of Mr. Rail, builder of rails and trains that need not arrive anywhere and of glass palaces that collapse under the weight of exhibitions and photographs, they say that he continued to stare straight ahead, mister Rail, but nothing to be done. He really could not fathom it. Impossible. Truly, he could not see it. On which side was life.)
In the meantime, you collected little bits of paper gleaned from the books found in the Pell-Mell and handled by unknown and anonymous hands. Of these solid objects, that watch us, you held out the slim chance of an encounter, of a lingering upon a page. An erotic of unpredictable deviations from the straight line. (0000.....)
(…)the poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities – even the poetry of nothingness – issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world. This atomizing of things extends also to the visible aspects of the world, and it is here that Lucretius is at his best as a poet: the little motes of dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight in a dark room (II, 114-124) (…) or the spider webs that wrap themselves around us without our noticing them as we walk along(III, 381-390).
Tuned to these experiences that hover on the edge of telling, you approached a kind of omega point where (when/as) time tips into space, the clock stopped at 11:11 and one no longer seeks to align cause and effect: It felt real, the pace was paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real. (…) light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies. (22)
Standing was part of the art, the standing man participates (…) But always back to the wall, in physical touch, or he might find himself doing what, he wasn't sure … (120)
These abstract moments, all form and scale, the carpet pattern, the grain of the floorboards, binding him to total alertness, eye and mind, and then the overhead shot of the landing… (119)
At the base of the wall (screen) you lay down upon the ground and with rigour, neither moving nor stretching, you tried to reach the ceiling with the help of a projection on glass. Like a writing played out infinitely on a piece of paper the size of this transit lounge: from the closed universe to the infinite world.
Text by Michela Sacchetto | | | | | | | | | | Rozafa Elshan: "Synthèse d’une excursion" | | | | | | | Rozafa Elshan (born in Luxembourg in 1994) graduated in 2020 with a BA in Photography at ESA le 75 in Brussels. She is currently pursuing her studies at the ERG in MA Artistic Practices and Scientific Complexity in Brussels. It is through the classical apprenticeship of photography that she that she was able to quickly create a certain link with the matter of analog photography. This medium allows her to carry out a vast research on the relationship between body, space-time and uses other tools such as sculpture, drawing and performance to materialize a distance in hollow that is always mobile and changing. Her practice is inscribed above all in an ordinary everyday life that allows her to accumulate all sorts of objects to then arrange them in the form of flow in a concrete space. This discrete intervention without beginning or end, is constantly on the move to extend the perception of things. It does not designate a subject, but seeks in this artistic process to experience the effect of a becoming. | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Marie Capesius: "HELIOPOLIS – in the blue shadow of the city of the sun", 2021 | | | | | | HELIOPOLIS | | | | In the blue shadow of the city of the sun | | | | 24 April – 13 June 2021 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Marie Capesius: "HELIOPOLIS – in the blue shadow of the city of the sun", 2021 | | | | | | In the beginning of the 1930s the first naturist village in Europe "Héliopolis" was founded on Île du Levant, an island in the French Mediterranean sea. The first adepts of the naturist movement set foot onto this wild island to escape the bustling city life and live a more healthy lifestyle in accordance with nature. Over time, simple bungalows, camping facilities, a school and village facilities were built. Electricity was only brought in 1989 to Héliopolis, highlighting the naturist community’s determination to preserve their natural lifestyle and philosophy. In the 1950’s, the French marine also settled on the island and until today, they use 90 percent of the surface of the island as a military base and missile test station. A fence separates these two opposite worlds that cohabit within the same landscape. Intrigued by these striking contrasts, Marie Capesius documents the daily life in Héliopolis with her camera and encounters its inhabitants for more than three years. A statement that she regularly heard "Here, it is paradise" ignited her reflection upon the notion of paradise. What is paradise? What could it be or did it ever exist?
Inspired by the tales of Adam and Eve, she intuitively composes an open tale that questions the subconscious emotions tied to paradise and hell with her photographs and furtive notes. She comes to the conclusion that paradise and hell can be found on both sides of the fence, that the presence of life and death form a whole, a cyclical evolution in nature. She uses symbols she finds within nature; such as for example the snake and the scorpion, to evoke archaic references and highlight a metaphysical interpretation.
For the EMOP "Rethink Nature and Landscape", Marie Capesius presents her ongoing series "Héliopolis", which was initially exhibited in Berlin for her graduate show at "Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie" at the end of 2019. With an extended version and site specific installation within the gallery Nei Liicht, she invites the spectators to dive into a more intimate view of the contrasting inner and outer landscapes of her work. She includes a display of originals extracted from the notebook she kept during her research on the island, a photo projection where she includes field recordings from the island, a series of nude photography and visual representations of the military side, that she associates to the colour blue, that casts a shadow on the city of the sun. | | | | | | | | | | Marie Capesius: "HELIOPOLIS – in the blue shadow of the city of the sun", 2021 | | | | | | | Marie Capesius, born 1989, lives and works in Luxembourg. Recently graduated from the photography school “Ostkreuzschule” in Berlin with her serie "HELIOPOLIS". In 2020 she was awarded the scholarship for creation by Centre National Audiovisuel in Luxembourg. In her artistic approach, she engages the subject with intuition and seeks inspiration through encounters. She retraces stories and uses symbols, movement and mystery to evoke subconscious emotions and highlight the reflection of timelessness. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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© 26 Apr 2021 photo-index UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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