A project by Franco-Swiss photographer Valérie Clément dedicated to
understanding the memory of the Chernobyl disaster through fiction.
The idea for this project came after reading Svetlana Alexieevich’s
book Voices from Chernobyl (Tschernobilskaya Molitva), which became
something of a sensation in France in the early 1990′s. This
highly-praised oral history of Chernobyl by a Belarusian writer and
dissident (Alexieevich currently lives in Sweden) is based on the
recollections of various survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear accident,
which took place in April 1986. Photographer Valérie Clement’s first
contact was as an art director working with Nicole Vautrin, who staged a
play based on the book in Grenoble.
Chernobyl. Ukrainians feel that this page of our collective history
has been fully, if not excessively depicted: so much evidence, so many
investigations, and the countless interpretations we’ve been asked to
read, watch and hear. Yet despite the overwhelming mass of material,
Clement manages to create an aesthetic and emotional world, and she does
this by starting from a deep personal experience of visiting Ukraine.
Her world is based on empathy and complicity with people on the brink of
survival.
Some of her photos were taken in France and Switzerland, with
non-professional actors and ordinary people who become heroes and
heroines in the stories told by the photographer.
“Each recreated image – is a sculpture in time, an attempt to answer
the question: what happened? I was constantly trying to find clues in
the landscape, the facial expressions, the position of the bodies. But
finally, we’ll never know. No hints – but that there is no hate or
violence. No blood, no obvious wounds. No requirements, no conviction.
Only silence and solitude, nothing else,” says Clement about her
experience.
The exhibition consists of 50 photographic works made using the
author’s technique of multiple overlapping of different textures,
creating an effect close to painting.
This photographic series has no trace of fascination in poverty or
suffering, and even the familiar landscapes of the Exclusion Zone,
despite these having become a cliché of social photography in Eastern
Europe. The works are presented in a very personal, even phantasmagoric
way, reminiscent of the melancholy of the work of Russian film director
Andrei Tarkovsky.
In Tarkovsky’s book “Sculpting in Time”, he depicts his
cinematographic technique, based on the capturing of the flow of time.
Following his tradition, Valerie Clement tries to capture the
post-Soviet reality, offering the spectator her own view through the
lens, recalling for us the confusion and alienation that swept this
country in the late 80′s and 90′s – feelings which in some ways never
disappeared, and which allow us to experience the past as if it were the
present.
Data: 13.02.2013
Fonte: www.bottega-gallery.com
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