Numéro 57, avril 2002 Paysage construit Constructed Landscape

EN :

Ivan Binet's images are impossible panoramic views that retrace the wanderings of the photographer-walker in different regions of Quebec. First sketched out during the shooting, these panoramas truly take form only during digital montage. Because of this, they constitute true "theatres of time and space"—the long time it takes for humans to transform landscapes, the time of walks condensed into images that stretch to allow the viewer to see more than the visual field permits in reality, multiple spaces to be seen simultaneously, forming a sort of directory of the experience of the vernacular landscape.

FR :

Des identités instables émergent des cartographies de lieux qu’effectue Manuel Piña : la mémoire prend la forme du paysage. On Monuments est un commentaire sur la réécriture de l’histoire, sur les idéologies et l’oblitération du passé. Piña a photographié les sites où des monuments furent démolis durant la Révolution de 1959. Il présente ces sites comme les traces discrètes d’une histoire indicielle qui s’est effacée. L’article commente aussi deux séries antérieures de l’artiste : (De)constructions and Utopias (Tribute to Eduardo Muñoz), de 1996, qui traite de la pénurie de logements à Cuba, et Water Wastelands, de 1992-1994, avec la mer comme métaphore du vide au coeur de l’idéologie et de l’utopie.

EN :

Isabelle Hayeur's work points as much to the idea of "realism" in photography as to that of authenticity of the landscape(s). These are linked issues, since the landscape is probably photography's last bastion of invisibility. The unknown, or unknowable, places that Hayeur fabricates by blending different sites into a single territory, a single tableau, are like faults or breaks that draw attention to the state of the non-places that surround us. Between the critical regard and the disturbance, Hayeur creates a unique attraction, difficult to name or qualify, to these disenchanted zones, which are as if dehumanized because they are too humanized.

EN :

The retrospective exhibition Herbert List – Flâneur romantique raises questions that come less from the photographs than from the proposed discourse. List's career and life are presented as exemplars without the slightest trace of a shadow. It is mentioned that his way of life, his homosexual friendships, and his partly Jewish upbringing made him suspect to the Nazi regime, but nothing is said about the war period and his enlistment in the Wehrmacht as chief of the mapping department in 1944-45. Such a presentation is stunning as an accounting of an artist whose work is in fact distinguished by his "plays of shadow and light."