For this new year of partnership between the PhotoSaintGermain Festival and the École d'architecture Paris-Malaquais - PSL, the Galerie Callot presents (Zus), a project developed by Benoît Fougeirol. Alongside this work and in dialogue with the artist, undergraduate students, supervised by teacher and photographer Anne-Lise Seusse, produced an editorial piece recounting a territory explored collectively.
In 1996, the French state created an atlas of territories under the acronym ZUS - Zone Urbaine Sensible ("Sensitive Urban Zone") - designating neighborhoods with deteriorating housing, marked by hardships such as unemployment and precarity faced by their residents. This precise administrative tool, built from statistical surveys and combining maps, street-by-street data, and dynamic cartography, structured the photographic and editorial work Benoît Fougeirol carried out between 2010 and 2017 in the Île-de-France region. Depictions of 11 of these territories on the outskirts of Paris make up the book (Zus).
The editorial form was conceived as a way of linking the photographed space to the space of the page, as a metaphor for these territories. Like the ZUS atlas itself, the publication brings maps, photographs, and place names into confrontation. Together, they question the notion of boundary, the nature of cartographic representations that create new borders even as they claim to erase them, set maps against photographs, and probe the gap between perceived reality, lived reality, and representation.
(Zus) received the MAD ADAGP Artist's Book Prize in 2018.
Galerie Callot
The Galerie Callot is a space for exploring and sharing architectural culture, engaging with major contemporary material, spatial, ecological, and social questions. Run by the École d'architecture Paris-Malaquais - PSL, which places research and experimentation at the heart of its teaching, the gallery is a free, open exhibition and meeting space where informed amateurs, professionals, curious visitors, and students from French and international architecture schools think together about new ways of inhabiting the world.
The aim of the partnership is to co-build, together with an invited artist exhibited during the festival, a documentary photography project examining peripheral urban situations and bearing witness to the lives of their residents.
The Galerie Callot receives support from the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca - Institut de France.