SAND OF NOISES
A hand grasping a stone, a lava stone; captured in close-up, the hand clings to its rocky matrix as if to tear it away, extract its essence, or caress it: this black and white photograph taken on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily speaks volumes about the work undertaken by the artist duo Sand of Noises, composed of Marie Hervé (1996) and Elsa Martinez (1994). Their work explores traces, taking on the character of a journey, or rather a wandering, since the two artists refer to themselves as "wandering photographers." This archaeological and dreamlike wandering, begun a few years ago in the Mediterranean basin through explorations and residencies, has resulted in a collection of images from photographs taken on site, as well as from historical documents. Bringing forth and resonating the "sounds" of the sand and ancestral stones of this mythological land, like an archaeologist unearthing pottery shards, these fragments of images, transformed by complex processes of printing and colorization, and staged in exhibition spaces, function as palimpsests. Thus, in Island#1, photographs of a rocky shore were silkscreened onto pieces of marble exhumed from an abandoned quarry—a chaotic and poetic imprint of time also visible in Rebuilt-Athens (inkjet print on rice paper), which shows us the makeshift restorations carried out on ancient capitals. These capitals, along with statues, reappear in color in their series Monologue for a Stone (risograph, 2021).
THE WANDERING PHOTOGRAPHY
An exploration of "figures of ruin" and a reappropriation—or, to use their own words, a "[reconstruction] on an already existing form"—echoing "an exploration of liminal spaces." These "liminal spaces" are understood as borders delimiting territories, but also as the tangled sequences of memory oscillating between truth and falsehood, historical facts and myths, reality and fantasy… It is to open the door to this imaginary world that the young duo plays with scale, disproportion, and fragmentation. While Seuil #1 #2 #3 unfolds in three panels the fascinating landscape of "phantom islands" photographed at night during a sea crossing between the port of Marseille and Ajaccio, on a roll of rice paper in order to "account for this movement and this shifting vision of space," La Notte presents a close-up image, fragmented in two, of a piece of rock photographed at night on the Corsican coast. “Extract of isolated matter,” like the rocks in the Isola series, the image aims to disorient us, allowing our imagination to roam free. “[…] isola is the island, but above all, it designates this photographic gesture of isolating, even erasing, all geographical, temporal, and contextual markers. Visitors often describe these images as aerial views, or conversely, as photographs taken under a microscope. It is precisely this loss of information that creates the possibility of continually reinventing the image […].”
BIOGRAPHY
Graduates of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in 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 publishing house MYTO and the risograph workshop UltraViolet (Marseille). They were awarded the Eurazeo grant in 2020 for their project exploring the Mediterranean space, "building a constantly evolving personal archive," which began in Palermo in 2020.
"I approached a stone, I listened to it speak to me."
GALERIE F. 27, RUE SAINT-PIERRE, SENLIS
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2, 2023
GALERIEFRANCOISE.COM
MUTA GALLERY EXHIBITION
TURIN – ITALY
UNTIL JULY 31, 2023
KORA ART CONTEMPORARY CENTER EXHIBITION
CASTRIGNANO DEI GREICI
LECCE – ITALY
UNTIL NOVEMBER 19, 2023
