Duographie retraces ten years of the creation of the artist duo Pétrel I Roumagnac (duo), formed by Aurélie Pétrel and Vincent Roumagnac. At the crossroads of visual arts and theatre, their work explores the dialogue between photography and staging through installations with reactivation protocols and photostage pieces. Since 2013, they have been designing creations that evolve in accordance with their exhibition environment, questioning the conventions of the visibility of works, both in space and time. Each of the pieces presented by the duo is constantly moving in its exhibition space, evolving between latency time, reserve space and redistribution in space, according to successive rearrangements of photographic objects and other materials that make up them. The result is hybrid installations, a contemporary object theatre with blurred temporalities, a mixture of still images, body traces and performative sculpture in perpetual movement. The book takes the position of focusing visually on de rêves, d’Astérion, and de l’Ekumen, the trilogy of photoscenic pieces created by the duo between 2016 and 2023, each offering an immersive dive into their abundant floating universe. The duophonic play in nine scenes reproduces, in a theatre format, interviews between the two protagonists, which, together with friends passing through the course of their discussion, take place throughout the work played in and for the book, and illuminating, at the heart of the words inside, the ten years of this unique work in duo.

La pratique photographique d’Aurélie Pétrel interroge le statut de l’image, son utilisation ainsi que les mécanismes de sa production. Ancrées dans la durée, ses recherches visent à ramener la prise de vue au centre de la réflexion multisensorielle à l’aide de dispositifs spatiaux. Aurélie Pétrel pose la question de la mutation-mutabilité d’une image, son potentiel de fractalisation, non seulement en soi mais aussi dans ce qu’elle peut provoquer comme trouble en son expérience de pluriperception. Pour elle, une prise de vue génère une multitude de prises de point de vue. Les temps et les espaces ne cessent de se superposer, tout en ne cessant pas de se disjointer. L’image mouvante se redistribue et ses métamorphoses consécutives viennent ainsi déjouer son absorption consensuelle, sa perception une et définitive, son moment et sa position décisifs. Mettant en oeuvre les outils formels et les processus intellectuels tant des artistes que des chercheurs, Pétrel associe une démarche plasticienne et conceptuelle dans une suite programmatique de mises en situation, où le format exposition rejoue à chaque fois différemment, la dimension interprétative de toute partition, de toute photographie en latence, de toute forme en attente de métamorphose. Son travail fait partie de la collection du Musée de l’Élysée de Lausanne (CH) ; du Centre National d’Art Moderne (MNAM)–Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, du Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), du FRAC Normandie Rouen et du FRAC Occitanie Montpellier…

Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Algeria… In this deeply personal work, Jean-Christophe Béchet looks back thirty-five years on his first steps as a young photographer. This long-term work (three years of immersion), which he affectionately calls “my African years”, should have been his first book, but his personal and photographic life decided otherwise.

Few images circulated, the majority having remained in archive boxes all these years. Today, he has reworked his selection, seeking to find a new rhythm. He notes: “As we age, images change their status, some memories fade, others take over, some images take on greater force, others become repetitive and a little ‘cliché’. You have to be able to navigate between a kind of nostalgia (inevitable, since photography is also the art of the past) and a desire to build a contemporary work with photographs that are more than 35 years old”.

Most of the territories featured in African Memories are no longer accessible to French or European visitors. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the countries that welcomed him so warmly with his backpack, are now closed places. This book is a vibrant tribute to Africa from a passionate photographer.

In 2003, in the singular setting of the ghost town of Cook, Australia, Laurent Mulot “implanted” the first Middle of Nowhere Contemporary Art Center with the only two inhabitants of this small town. This book is a monograph looking back on more than 20 years of research and encounters around the world, which gradually enabled the author to collaborate with astrophysicists on the notion of the “Middle of Nowhere”.

The work was analyzed by contemporary art historian and critic Paul Ardenne.

This boxed set includes 8 items (books, leporello, posters) for an exceptional experience at the crossroads of contemporary art and archaeology. In 2014, artist Mirela Popa began a project based on the archaeological excavations carried out in Ivry Confluence, notably on the grounds of the former BHV depots, and the preventive excavation campaigns organized on sites dating from the Neolithic period, doomed to disappear due to the necessities of urban expansion. Working in close collaboration with archaeologists, the artist’s work was thus marked by an extensible chronology: from one changing territory to another, from the Neolithic to the contemporary period.

This photographic work is a testimony to American gang culture that glorifies easy money, mistrust towards authorities and wild flirt. Through the months that Souhayl A spend in Florida, he tried to document and decipher from within the daily life of Sex, Money, Murder, one of the world most violent gang. 

For several years, Sylvie Bonnot has been conducting an artistic and documentary research on French forests, gathering images in mainland France and French Guiana. The wide gaps that characterizes both of the lands are linked here to show the complex reality of landscapes and the industry. « From the near forest, in Burgundy and Savoie, she tried to measure and transcribe human confrontation, in both the forestry and the hydroelectric development. […] she puts forward the flora, fauna, humanity relationship in its untamed condition. Machines and installations come together with the organic world in a brutal way yet always poetic, crossed by a serpent molt, and fleeing animality. Under that name (molt), Sylvie Bonnot transforms photographic prints for about a decade, by pulling away the gelatin on which the image was formed, from the paper, to give birth to an hybrid world ». (Excerpt from a text by Sophie Eloy and François Michaud). The book opens on a wide ensemble of « molts », photographic creation crafted on a strong documentary research on the differents state of nowadays forest exploitation. It resumes on what is called a small atlas of the forest, enabling the lector to discover and follow the documentary research that allows the artist to form her body of work. 

Doutes is a journey between Marseille, where André Mérian lives, and Avignon, where he often meets his partner between 2019 and 2021. All the photographs that make the book have been taken in places, interiors, landscapes daily crossed by the artist. Sidewalks, just like living room tables, become scenes on which the objects arrange themselves in precarious balances as the day and the colors go by. Carried away by the flow of situations, André Mérian manages to ceize micro-landscapes, involuntary sculptures and broken chips of reality. From this common space, he succeeds in taking the eye away from the beaten path. 

Istanbul, Will you still love tomorrow is a photographic journey through a black-and-white Istanbul, far from tourist clichés. Jehsong Baak set out to capture the tender moments, encounters and skin-touching of the people of Istanbul in this city at the crossroads of Asia and Europe. Cultures cross throughout the book, oscillating between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism. Jehsong Baak’s gentle eye brings together the differences and antagonisms of contemporary Istanbul, where the great tenderness of the Turkish people still prevails. This book is a true declaration of love to the city and its inhabitants.

Mayotte is rich of a thousand cultural and geographical specificities, which have fascinated photographer Frank Tomps ever since he discovered this magnificent territory. In 2011, Mayotte became France’s 101^st department, leading to a rapid and fragmented societal restructuring and ultimately, an explosive social and political climate fueled by the demographic crisis and the desire for a metropolitan lifestyle. Franck Tomps aims to understand this historical transition as much as to explain it through his photographic work, the first of its kind on the territory.