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Sophie Ristelhueber continues, since her work on the
city of Beirut destroyed by the war in 1982, her exploration
of the world, her reflection on the territory and her history.
Like an archeologist, she examines the traces left by man
on the surface. This obsession with markings often led her
on places with a millenary culture but also remnants of war,
places marked by a neverending building and destructing activity.
The aerial views or the views very close to the ground which
she made about the battle fields after the first Gulf War,
were compiled in a tiny book, Fait (1992).
The photographs exhibited at the Aquarium of Valenciennes,
empty landscapes, gained by a desolation atmosphere, bring
another question: that of the representation of a mythical
place, present within the collective memory, faced with the
triviality of its current state. The starting point is the
very presence of a hand-written lettering on the photograph
expressing the shot's location and date. The five exhibited
works were already gathered in a collective exhibition, in
1997, entitled: “Géographiques: territoires vécus,
territoires voulus, territoires figurés”. Sophie
Ristelhueber indeed puts forth, with this open series, a dialogue
between the experienced element and the represented element.
She explains: “The Equator Line: to me is an earth globe
in a classroom, cut in the middle by the 0° parallel.
How to photograph something so abstract? " She chose
the terasse of an abandoned café on Sao Tome Island,
in the Gulf of Guinea, one of the sites crossed through by
40,000 kilometers of abstraction. The aerial view of Shatt
al-’Arab, shows this delta located in Iraq, formed by
the confluence of the Tigre and the Euphrate rivers and which
is situated at the bottom of Mesopotamia: “Where the
first urban civilizations were born, nothing to see with those
Iraq marshlands dried and full of the holes made by bombs”.
She goes on: “Sodom. Can this salt extraction plant,
south of the Dead Sea, be considered a relic of the punishment
which struck the biblical city? Sabra and Chatila. How do
these two children, the horse and the bicycle evoke the massacre
committed in these places a few months earlier? Waterloo.
No comment! "
A.M.
 Exhibition
from May 25 to June Géographiques
at the Aquarium - 8, rue Ferrand - Valenciennes
Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 10am to 12am and from 2pm
to 6pm.
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2005 Transphotographiques Official
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