Géraldine Cario

Letter of intent

PARIS-ODESSA
A journey in chiaroscuro

I embarked on a journey that took me from Paris to Odessa, from
France to Ukraine. I passed through all the places I had heard about as
a child without ever having taken the time to locate them on a map. By
simply looking at the name changes of towns, countries and streets,
and the tribulations of a European Jewish family – of so many others –
the tormented history of Europe was sketched out against the light.
I don’t define myself as a photographer or a writer, but this is an
exhibition of photos and texts. Photos like notes taken, texts like labile
thoughts caught in the stream. I chose twenty of the more than 2,500
photographs taken during the journey to inhabit the exhibition space.
It’s a fractal exhibition in the sense that it gives an idea of the
photographs as a whole, and it’s adaptable because the number of
photographs depends on the place where they are shown.
The photographs are shown in the form of giant slides. The
proportions of a conventional slide have been preserved, only enlarged
as if by microscope. The reality is a strange insect that deserves a closer
look. This approach, together with the transparent films normally used
to print negatives and film filters, gives the photos an imprecise
graininess that makes their dating uncertain. By using an outdated
display process to enclose photographs that are, after all, contemporary,
the aim is once again to play with temporality. In a single glance, times
blend and histories intersect. What remains is the sensation of travel
and displacement. And as if in voice-over, sentences are sometimes
added to the images. We come across landscapes where we will never
really go, glimpsed through train windows, deserted hotel rooms,
buildings inhabited by strangers, names that are familiar but ultimately
unknown.
Sometimes I’ve divided up several photos on the same slide, as if it
were possible to concentrate and adopt different perspectives in a
single gesture, in a single moment.
The slides are backlit. Light, what holds it back or reveals it, is a central
metaphor in my work and particularly in this series; it’s a journey in
chiaroscuro where we go in search of light to ward off nothingness.
This journey is a crossing of absences, a pointer to our ontological
solitude, to the singular journey of each of us, and yet it is a journey
that can be shared. It is a silent conversation with ourselves, with the
generations that have gone before us and with those who are watching
today.

Géraldine Cario