The starting point of this project resides in a reflection on contemporary narratives in photographic creation on the one hand ; and the myth that surrounds the hotel La Louisiane on the other hand. PhotoSaintGermain invited ten artists to take over a hotel room for four days, exploring the theme of the body and its representations.. In the continuity of the creative energy that springs from the hotel La Louisiane — known for its tradition of welcoming artists since the 1930s —, PhotoSaintGermain presents an intertwining of several curations, related to the image and its use — between performance, exhibition, and publication.
Room 31 Emmanuelle Fructus · Collection un livre - une image La chambre des patiences (The room of patiences)
Emmanuelle Fructus invites visitors to consult the archive she patiently collected over twenty years, before its final departure to the Société française de photographie (SFP). This association, founded in 1854 by a group of amateurs, scientists and artists and now based at La Bibliothèque nationale Richelieu, will welcome the 30,000 photographs of the Un livre - Une image Collection, making them accessible to the community of historians, researchers and artists.
A series of performances and publications will enable visitors to experience first-hand this archive devoted to amateur and anonymous photography from 1880 to 1980. Conceived from the start as an attempt to take stock of family photography, visitors will be able to open the boxes and immerse themselves in this collection of images. This exhibition is an ode to the consultation of photographic documents, inviting both gaze and gesture.
Room 32 Nanténé Traoré The perfect photography (is a painting)
The perfect photograph (is a painting) is above all a dream of painting. While featuring people whose bodies have been erased by the history of art, this series of silver photographs draws its inspiration from the very classical codes of Romantic painting, and ultimately offers a shifted rewriting of love and death, in which the different techniques blur the boundary between photographic image and pictorial creation.
Room 33 Gil Lesage Dreams of light
Curatorial collaboration : Anne Racine
“My photos of Castiel are snapshots of life over a period of twenty years. At the age of 16, Castiel began a gender transition. What began as a creative game soon became a testimony; what couldn't be said came out and became blatant. Castiel's secrets and pain were imprinted in the negatives, shouting out their presence. Images of a wild child in harmony with nature gradually emerged, like images in which the forest is the child's shelter.
A sometimes fragile shelter.”
Gil Lesage
Room 34 Hélène Giannecchini & Félixe Kazi-Tani Hunger makes you restless
Curator : Cécilia Becanovic
They hold bottles, present dishes, raise their glasses to toast, cut cakes, but they never chew, swallow or gulp. Why is that?
Why are photographs of women eating so rare? What makes this vision unbearable or scandalous? Artist Félixe Kazi-Tani and writer Hélène Giannecchini propose an installation combining photography and literature that attempts to question this absence of representation.
Room 35 Ken Graves & Eva Lipman
Cortona on the move Restraint and Desire
Curators: Paolo Woods and Kublaiklan
The international photography festival Cortona On The Move is pleased to present Restraint and Desire, the culmination of a 31-year collaboration between Ken Graves and Eva Lipman. The couple documented a broad range of subjects, such as ballroom competitions, boxing matches and military ceremonies, tapping into a range of emotions that showcase the hidden tensions between separation and intimacy, release and containment, vulnerability and excess. Common motifs in the work are bodies in motion, the human drive toward risk-taking, the impossible pursuit of perfection, and rituals that enact the passage into manhood. Graves and Lipman highlight what lies beneath the surface, those moments that collectively we might wish to conceal.
“The series takes place inside an abandoned RV belonging to a cult leader in the
80's. I worked with a group of gender fluid girls from poor rural America, shaken by opioid epidemics. A shared flow of creativity enabled us to express, through photography, the cry of our human tragedy and claustrophobic social situation, on the verge of exploding. Because of my personal history, I recognize myself in these girls from the trailer parks, ignored, outlaws, leading a desperate rebellion: I see in them my past and I foresee in them the future. CULT is the cult of death, religions, drugs, celebrities, social networks, money, suicide, success, beauty, cinema, literature, weapons, fashion, sexuality, youth and, of course, the body.
The body is sometimes in the shadow of the predator, sometimes in the natural golden light that brings out reflections and scars. It's an asset but also a burden: a body jointly tortured, adored, mistreated, enslaved, transformed, oriented towards the profit of sex, consumerism and war. Underestimated, overestimated, it is full of desire and pain, whose only limit is death.
I wanted to stage the epic, poetic bodies of these girls, capable of adapting to conflict like chameleons, suggesting in fine the possibility of transcendence.”
Maya Mercer, North Carolina 2024
Room 37 Lusted Men
Lusted Men is a collection of erotic photographs of men, featuring images submitted by professional and amateur photographers of all genders and sexual orientations.Hundreds of photographs feature partners, lovers, models, friends and self-portraits, offering so many ways of recomposing our emotional and erotic bonds in the 21st century.
To coincide with the release of the book Lusted Men, published by Editions Hoëbeke, bringing together the 5 years of the collection, Lusted Men returns to PhotoSaintGermain and will be exhibiting for the first time the images received in 2023. Lusted Men is a living archive of men's visions of eroticism, joyfully shaking up gender representations and reaffirming the political dimension of our desires.
Room 38 Marianne Marić Girls from the East. Yugoslavia Ex-Yugoslavia
In 2012, Marianne Marić moved to Sarajevo for a residency unlike any other. Although she has no memory of the city, the country or the landscape, she nevertheless shares a painful bond with Ex-Yugoslavia. She wants to tame a complex history. She travelled there to confront her own history, that of her family, and in particular that of Yéléna, her sister. At the age of 16, Yéléna left Alsace and her family to try her luck in Paris. Tall, blonde, green-eyed, she was offered the chance to become a model. Eight years later, she died violently. Found cut up, like Yugoslavia. Her loss gave rise to a silence that the artist sought to break through images, travel and encounters. Marianne chases Yéléna's non-memory, associating the woman-object, the march (of the model, of the military, a memorial one) and the scar, telescoping her story with the story of a traumatized region.
The artist observes the traces of a violent path across a country in the process of reconstruction, while at the same time searching for the foundations of her own history. Memories are fragmented. Today, faces are appearing, and peace is emerging.
The Balkans, a region of multiple influences and civilizations, have been affected by constant geopolitical upheaval over the centuries. The women of this region, though often invisible in official accounts, have played a crucial role in preserving culture, language and traditions - while adapting to new political frontiers that constantly redrew their reality.
This ability to adapt, often handed down from generation to generation, shows the extent to which women have been and remain pillars of stability and continuity in this region where everything seems to fluctuate. The body as Landscape. The Body as a territory.
Marianne continues to photograph this “country”, and in particular the women who live there. For her, the body is a space, a geography, with scars, just like a country with its fluctuating borders. The country as body, the body as country. Marianne seeks to show us the history of the Balkans through the eyes of women.
Somewhere between documentary and fashion photography, she shows us photographs from Bosnia, Croatia and a new series recently completed in Serbia, in the deep countryside, where farmers, witches and women live.
Room 40 Shuwei Liu Tides, yes, breathing...
Curatorial collaboration : Victoria Jonathan
My works has been adjusting the distances between me and the world, to make the faraway existences almost reachable. For the existences that are too close to see to focus, are made seen through a further distance created.
Maybe it’s a sort of tradition to express feelings through landscapes in China, where bodies and the aura of bodies have been described as landscapes as well. All the emotions and feelings are deeply hidden and coded with all sort of landscapes.
Ji Kang, who is a talented artist from mid-third Century was described by his fellow writers :
"He's proud and independent like an alone pine tree; but when drunk, he's like a tall jade mountain that is about to fall.” “He is like the sound of wind rustling among the pine trees, high and soothing.”
I try to capture things that are not able to be captured. To capture a sense of fluidity, and flowing. When we talk about the body, the body is not just the body, it’s also a body of other things.
Marie-Hélène works in the “Direction Citoyenneté Proximité” (Citizenship and Proximity) department of the city of Montpellier. She's also my mother, and I often drop in to see her at her office. Our familiarity and the trust she places in me allow me to closely observe an example of human existence. The series isolates and documents an ordinary fact from its working environment.
With the support of
Hôtel La Louisiane
The Hôtel La Louisiane, 60 rue de Seine in the heart of Saint Germain-des-Prés, has built its identity in a setting full of chaos, freedom and nonsensical yet precious chatter. Since the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine, artists, creators and travelers in search of new experiences have taken up residence here for brief stays - among those who have lived here: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Gréco, Lucian Freud, Albertine Sarrazin, Syd Barret, Keith Haring, Quentin Tarantino and other contemporaries to whom Hôtel La Louisiane owes its discretion.
