[D]écrire
[D]écrire est un essai qui traite des relations entre la notion de territoire et les images qui en découlent en termes de paysage. Hypothèses qui se construisent à partir de la mise en relation de plusieurs paramètres comme le Sujet, le Terrotoire, les Marqueurs et la Temporalité.
Ce travail tente de proposer une manière d’aborder une production d’images pouvant faire “Paysage”.
le Sujet:
celui qui regarde
le Territoite:
ce qui est regardé par le sujet
Les Marqueurs:
ce qui semble singulier pour le Sujet qui considère le Territoire
la Temporalité:
qui définit pour le sujet la manière de considérer ce qu’il voit à un moment donné
[D]écrire is an essay that deals with the
relations between the notion of territory and the resulting images in terms of landscape.
Hypotheses that are constructed from the linking of several parameters such as the Subject, Territory, Markers and Temporality.
This work tries to propose a way of approaching a production of images that can make 'Landscape'.
the Subject :
whoever looks
the Territory :
what is watched by the subject
Markers:
which seems singular for the Subject who considers
the Temporality:
which defines for the subject how to consider this that he sees at some point
This book is a co-edition of
la boucherie editions and m.u.r.r
Completed with print on Rosa and Johannes, the presses of the atelier m.u.r.r
the first of April MMXVII
in Pantin, 4C.
Drawn in 100 numbered copies
The different boards of this book have been realized
from visuals of the four artist books of M & V Blary,
Parcelle Nr 11;
Places of Memories;
Village Portrait;
The Calvary, the Rosières Valley, PSP ...
and of the installation
The place, object of the place
Conception and realization
Martine & Vincent Blary
Vincent Busson & Ariel Fleiszbein
Thanks
The Regional Council of Picardy
and Hauts de France
The association Culture à la ferme
Prep’art foundation
The town of Toutencourt
Frédéric Guérin
Gaya Goldcymer
Cet ouvrage est une co-édition des
éditions de la boucherie et de m.u.r.r.
Achevé d’imprimé sur Rosa et Johannes, les presses de ‘atelier m.u.r.r.
le premier du mois d’avril MMXVII
à Pantin, 4C.
Tiré à 100 exemplaires numérotés
Les différentes planches de cet ouvrage ont été réaliées
à partir des visuels des quatre livres d’artiste de M & V Blary,
Parcelle N°11
Lieux de mémoires
Portrait de village
La calvaire, la vallée Rosière, PSP...
et de l’installation
Le lieu, objet du lieu
Conception et réalisation
Martine & Vincent Blary
Vincent Busson et Ariel Fleiszbein
Remerciements
Le Conseil Régional de Picardie
et des Hauts de France
L’association Culture à la ferme de Beauquesne
La fondation Prép’art
La commune de Toutencourt
Frédéric Guérin
Gaya Goldcymer
Exposition
A cour ouverte 10
Septembre 2017
80 600 Beauquesne
France
The subject & the nature
Interaction
that produces the notion
of landscape
Nature
What is at the origin,
the mineral, the vegetable,
the animal.
What man has
built and organized.
What makes the territory
The relationship between known
and unknown
Natural and wild
What the subject describes
The question of choice, of transcription.
Le sujet
The Place, object of the place
The first thing I had to do was to measure, to understand the measurements, with the idea of filling it and to find a spatial relationship to my measure.
And why not fill it again with itself, representing it in its space while playing with it to make it understandable by its reconstructed reconstruction? An irregular parallelogram nearly fifteen meters long and seven wide for perimeter; walls thirty centimeters thick and six meters high; a framework composed of two farms with two levels of entrances to contain the thrusts of the frame on the walls, the only physical elements that fill the thousand cubic meters of this place.
Its farms break it down into three subassemblies accessible by gates facing the street and the gable - open mouths through which the crops were projected and arranged by level, from the ground to the sandpit purlins.
To pile up, to ‘pile down’, to beat, these were the daily activities of this now empty place, which has seen more than a century of cereal harvests. For thirty five years, this barn is empty of all traces of agricultural activities but always full of memories for those who knew it at its peak.
When I crossed the threshold of this space for the first time, the immediate impression was associated with a scaled relationship: as I was so small under this frame, six meters higher, without a reference point where eye could have estimated the distances.
The device that will be given to you to apprehend is an installation that occupies the bulk of the volume of this barn, a pretext for an ambulatory journey in the codified space of the perspective and the image, confrontation between physical reality and visual perception, resemblance and illusion, figuration and abstraction.
During the opening, writings of Leon Baptista Alberti will be read in this place.
The sensitive and emotional relations that can carry us into such a situation are not enough to understand things; this place remains above all the visible trace of an act of entrepreneurs and craftmen who made it. This construction results from a response to a need inscribed within a given timeless, economic and social framework.
The farmer and the high voltage line
I remember an informal discussion with a farmer at the time when I was photographing the pylons of a very high voltage line and more particularly the construction site. It was the weekend, the yard was empty of its workers and all the equipment was still on the ground, the modules of metal frame, the insulators, the lines ...
This farmer asked me what was the reason for my presence on his field and we quickly came to discuss this line at UHV as an object that in his eyes seemed degrading to the landscape, which distorted a form of ideal that would be the campaign, as an offbeat element to what he saw as part of his environment, a way to build his reality. Throughout this discussion I realized that our points of view on this subject could have similarities but at the same time I realized that there were distances on our ways of associating the elements between them.
This man born on this territory, from a family of farmers for several generations had a way of thinking about his territory and the landscapes that result from it with reference elements related to the land and the activities that result from it.
Anything out of this practice of space was for him an excuse to discuss it, to put it out of his way of analyzing. These pylons were ugly, metal, industrial, too big and
disfigured the landscape, useless for him because conveying an energy that was not intended for him.
On this subject he mentioned the construction of a gas pipeline five years earlier which crosses the same area of this territory. On this point, no negative observations given that this facility is buried two meters underground, so invisible if not a few roadside information boards indicating its positioning. This conversation lasted 30 to 40 minutes, sitting on his tractor with a power of several hundred horses, with air conditioning and computer board, towing a plow of 6 blades and me, leaning back against the coachwork of this monster of which the rear wheels reached me at shoulder height. We were both in the same place at the same time and yet we did not see the same thing.
From this anecdote, I decided to work on these reports that we can have with what we are given to see and what we want to see.
Territories, places of life by nature, are certainly the best pretexts to engage this type of reflection.
Summer holidays
For the holidays we all four, my parents my brother and I, used to leave for a month by the sea, destination Berck-beach.
At the time we lived near Valenciennes and this seaside holiday began for me with an exotic bus ride. We temporarily left the coal tips of the mining basin for the dunes of the Opal Coast.
I remember that on this journey, every year, systematically half-way, in the vicinity of Doullens, my father challenged us:
'Look at the children, in the distance on your left, the little flags that emerge from the skyline, it is the Thiepval memorial.'
At the time, I was seven or eight years old and this request for attention seemed enigmatic.
Forty years later the hazards of life would take me with my family to live in a small village ten kilometers from Thiepval, near the town of Acheux-en-Amiénois, in the heart of a site that was violently marked by one of the battles of the first world war, the Battle of the Somme.
The Thiepval memorial was erected in memory of the seventy-three thousand three hundred and seventy-seven soldiers of the Somme without being able to be identified and without having received a burial.
The modern world
The Company develops the industry.
The state is preparing the war.
The Company consumes the energy of
worker to produce.
The State enlists the energy of the Citizen for establish his power.
The worker forces the material to
make goods and waste.
The Citizen submits his like to
produce conquests and waste.
The company creates storage places
for his waste.
The state creates military cemeteries.
The Company recycles its waste in
clean duit.
The state recycles its dead into
memory.
The company is clean.
The state is clean.
The worker consumes.
The Citizen commemorates.
Man invents war.
Village portrait
What do we remember from crossing a village? Of these groups of dwellings dissociated from each other by spaces of uninhabited territories dedicated to culture and breeding?
Some characteristics close to the
stereotype: agricultural buildings built on the outskirts of the agglomeration, a bell tower that is defined in the heart of a
tangle of roofs predominantly red tile or slate gray.
The approach of the place allows to glimpse some architectural forms, farms, public buildings inherited from the 3rd Republics, like the municipal school or the post office, some houses with character said "regional", businesses from the Thirty
Glorious or pavilions, models of standardization and modernity.
Ephemeral portrait that prints on our retina for a few minutes before crossing the next few kilometers.
However these places are the result of a work on the long term, the territories were built over time, by the action of the man on his environment.
Water
The word landscape has complex relations with our perception of the space in which we live: It can define the moment from a point of view of a country or a territory or the image produced from this same piece country, considered from a predefined point of view. It can still designate an artistic production having for subject this word.
These definitions refer to the path of a personal or collective thought in our relationship to the Territory, a complex space composed of natural elements, constructed and manufactured. Relationships that seem obvious, we bathe and live with daily, we are part of this entity without attaching any more importance.
The relationship we have with the air is quite close to this observation. If I stick to the definition of the composition of the air, I line up figures:
78% nitrogen - 21% oxygen - 1% rare gas, carbon dioxide and methane.
Depending on the situations and circumstances, this encrypted data will take on meaning.
One will become aware of its existence at first for vital reasons, the need to breathe. Reasons which will be altered according to abnormal situations, intensive efforts or rarefaction of certain chemical components of the air.
Territoires
Then we have a set of definitions, words that will qualify in its materiality: it will be more or less loaded with moisture, dry, moist, wet, or suspended particles, fog, Fogg, frost ...
Its displacement also has degrees of definition that the language describes with nuance: A current of air, a breeze, a wind, a squall, a tornado, a storm ...
It will also be able to load recognizable and definable olfactory indices in terms of heat, notions of convection or radiation ...
The air is everywhere but we do not see it. To perceive it and give it meaning, it is necessary to associate it with circumstances of temporality and situation.
For the landscape, it is the same, the notion of "country" or "territory" is to be considered as a 'mille feuilles'. Each stratum consists of formal elements classifiable in relation to the intervention of Man on the physical geography of space.
The temporality is also a determining factor in the way of considering the territory apprehended.
Alongside these considerations, whoever looks at or does the image will do so according to his knowledge.
France Info
The COP 21 ends, I listen to the speech synthesis of Mr. Laurent Fabius while drawing on my computer.
I try to give meaning by an image to a number that I can not quantify:
This pipeline has the capacity to transport fourteen billion cubic meters per year and it doubles a previous facility built in nineteen hundred and ninety-eight with a capacity of seventeen thousand cubic meters.
TERRITORIES
Territory and cartography
The notion of territories is built by accumulations of formal elements resulting from the development of the activity of man on his environment.
Visible components of physical, sociological and economic geography. This descriptive look leads to the production of images whose purpose is multiple uses.
The representation
The relief maps of the IGN have a dimensional particularity, their aspect is illustrative, close to the diorama or the model, will to approach naturalistic notions by the codes colors, white for the eternal snows and the glaciers, shades of ocher and gray for massifs, soft green for alluvial plains and shades of blue for the depths of the oceans.
However, the water element does not exist since the seabed is represented. Another singular element of these relief maps, the scale relationship between plane and different relief, the scale of heights is greater than that of the plane.
Cartography
Mapping alone proposes a great diversity of images from a projection system, the map is a plan that is built on satellite and telemetry data, thus data collected by several projection systems;
Figures and forms
The cartographic representation can function as a figure, I will recognize the map of France or that of Italy because their contours are familiar to me, it may not be the same for that of British Columbia because I I do not have the slightest knowledge of this figure.
The scales
The physical cartography informs about the relief, the boundaries between land and water, the rivers, the wooded areas.
The scale of these maps gives additional information more accurate, if we take a map at 1 / 25,000, the relief will be represented by contour lines of five in five meters.
Toponymy will be positioned nominally in the space of the map. These scale changes will also change the formal character of the representation.
Signs and symbols
For industrial, economic or demographic geography, the map is used as a medium on which are placed significant forms, often pictograms which will be declined in terms of drawing, color code and accompanied by a legend.
Field
At an intermediate level of the designation of the space by the image, the cadastre is another way to signify it, it is the domain of the Land Registry, a plot is a number inscribed in a lot corresponding to a part of the territory of the commune.
Marqueurs
THE MARKERS
The landscape is a way of representing the territory, it gives us an account of the space by processes of transcription close to the perceived reality, the drawing, the photo, the film, images which refer in appearance to the systems of representation agreed, understandable by the greatest number because close to the virtual reality.
It is certainly for this reason that in our work we often use book support, a way of grouping a quantity of images that respond to multiple points of view. None of them is more important than another, we must confront them, get an idea, assemble the elements to give them meaning, knowing that no documentary work offers an objective point of view.
This type of image is built from a point of view, from an element that the subject will choose, a 'marker', which catches his attention, it can be a tree, a factory, a shopping center or a military cemetery, depending on the circumstances.
This marker become fragment of the territory will make 'landscape' and will take a certain autonomy from its territory of origin. It will enter into the concerns of the one who makes the image, to be manipulated according to the intentions of the latter.
If one takes as an example the work entitled 'Places of Memories', devoted to the presence of Commonwealth war cemeteries of the First World War in the territories of Picardy, it is obvious that they function as markers decline like a commemorative charter in the landscape. In 2007 this work was presented at the Historial of the Great War of Péronne in addition to an exhibition dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the creation of the Commonwealth War Grave Commission.This event was an opportunity to present the book whose main subject was devoted to presenting the action of this organization which has, among other things, taken charge of the design and construction of the British war cemeteries of the First World War. This book, commissioned by the CWGC, was illustrated with photos of a British artist who was the subject of this exhibition.
His work was part of the Commonwealth Order.
Each of these two projects had the same subject, the markers were the same; British miiltarian cemeteries; but the approaches in terms of point of view were completely different.
For the CWGC photograph, the marker 'cemetery' became the object of the image, it was sublimated by color prints, with a formal dreamlike or even pathetic approach; forced by twilight lights and misty spaces. For their part, the pictures of 'places of memoirs' decommissioned the 'mark' cemetery in favor of its contemporary environment, a farm, a supermarket or a service station. The photos were shot in black and white with no special 'effect'.
In both projects the images were related to an editorial and iconographic form, the book for the British photographer, images and descriptive texts for 'Places of Memories'.
Another iconographic and editorial form accompanied this exhibition, that of the museum curator.
These images were also accompanied by titles or legends, associated with other images or contiguous to the editorial matter which could give them an illustrative character.
These two productions, although different, nevertheless had connections by being gathered in an identified setting, an exhibition and a place, the museum of the Great War of Péronne.
The images of these productions, which seemed to have taken their autonomy as a fragment of territory, quickly become dependent again on another system, that of communication.
Temporalitées
TEMPORALITIES.
For there to be a landscape there should have confrontation between the territory and the subject - the viewer, the one who sees and transcribed from what the eye gives to him to see and how it will be interpreted.
This relationship is obviously conditioned by the time factor that can be grasped at several levels over the thing seen, singularly or simultaneously.
Linear temporality
The action of man on the territory produces form by modifying physical geography, transforming social structures and replacing systems with others.
The perception of these observations functions as a principle of accumulation and stratification. Past and present blend together as elements that participate in the global culture of the territory.
Historical temporality
It is associated with the subject and is an integral part of what it is. It impacts on his way of understanding, analyzing what is given to him to look at by accumulation of knowledge. It directly questions the linear temporality.
Thematic temporality
Unlike linear temporality, the thematic notion takes into account only one aspect of the territory: geographical, social, cultural ...
Cyclical temporality
It makes it possible to highlight the material characteristics of temporal repetitive principles. This approach is based on the main principles of the division of time: day / night, month, seasons, seconds, minutes, hours ... In rural areas it is particularly perceptible through the rhythms of the climate, seasons and economic exploitation of the resources.
Temporality of circumstance
It participates to highlight an
event which comes to disturb, on a more or less long equence, the rhythms of the cyclical temporality.
This perception functions as a parenthesis in the cyclical temporality.
Images paysages
IMAGES / LANDSCAPE
Context
The place that is the subject of this work is part of a rural area: space for cultivation and livestock, a portion of the territory of the rural municipality of Toutencourt in the department of the Somme. It is crossed by the byroad 23, lines of communication linking the cities of Doullens and Corbie and crossing a mosaic of villages a few kilometers away. Several localities compose it: the Rosière Valley, Panayme, Mount Renard ...
On the edge of this road, a Calvary erected in the 14th century - assembly of metal elements, beams and wrought iron. A small piece of foundry on this cruciform set represents the body of Christ. The whole is sealed on a hillock of stoneware of truncated pyramidal shape. Eight lime trees cut in espalier define the perimeter of this turfed space.
This set, made up of multiple figures, contributes to the definition of the aesthetics of 'Pastoral' rurality; fields, pastures, hedges, groves and woods. It is geometrically structured from the cadastral plan of the agricultural plots of land, a scheme of regrouping of lands of the years one thousand nine hundreds sixty.
Its representation in plan reveals a structure in 'fishbones' having as axes roads, paths and easements. The point of view that makes 'landscape' is conditioned by the different axes of circulation. The byroad 23 offers mainly two:
- Leaving the village, on the left the Calvary, a wooded hillside on its height and on the right a cultivated plain whose perspective is formed by different curtains of trees and a large wood in the background.
- Returning to the village, the view is light dive and crosses the wooded hillside mentioned above. On each side it is completed by a set of cultivated agricultural plots of land (geometric structures), the first houses of the village and their gardens. The background consists of several small undulations of cultivated or wooded land.
7 ° 24
Before being assembled and buried the pipeline tubes were deposited along the construction site.
In the series with the title 7 ° 24 ', it is the assembly unit of the pipeline, the standard tube 10 meters long by 1.20 meters in diameter which causes the landscape.
Between the time they are dropped by the carriers, methodically in order to facilitate the assembly, and the moment they are assembled, they can be used as 'device to view, to watch’.
If one lands at one of their ends to take a picture, the image produced results from a point of view that is not chosen. The subject operates as a simple participant who puts a first (photographic) camera in a second one, the tube. He presses the trigger of the camera but it is the driver of the machine who put down the tube that unintentionally sets the point of view: The tube in such place, with such orientation and such inclination. The dimensions and the proportions of the produced image result from the ratio of proportions between the measurements of the tube, length and diameter, namely a field of vision of approximately 7 °. The photographic image produced by this type of protocol consists of 5% of a landscaped representation and 85% of an "abstract" representation, resulting from the action of light on the material inside the tube.
These 85% function as a frame in relation to the landscape figure and the whole image produced brings together in one whole 'Pastorality' and 'Industriality'.
In this series of photos as in many others, the human being is never represented directly, physically, materially, on the other hand each element retained to make landscape was manufactured by him, they are the interfaces between man and landscape.
A third point of view also seems relevant: It is located at the end of an agricultural road starting from Calvary. In three hundred meters of walking one rises about twenty-five meters compared to the byroad 23 and when one turns the perception of the territory is quite different. The plunging view on the Rosière Valley and the village dwellings changes the proportions of the space previously perceived, the depth of field is amplified to place in principal what closed the perspective of the first two points of view on the road.
Apart from a few details - an automobile on the byroad, a tractor treating a plot of land of rapeseed, this landscape point of view could not be associated with a definite temporality.
On the other hand, various indications place this moment in an obvious modernity: large, dense and homogeneous rapeseed fields, constant height of vegetation, traces of motorized agricultural machinery confirming the repeated treatments of these cultivated plots of land.
Claude's new mirrors
Landscape is a way to describe and build the world in images. In the beginning, it took shape under the hand of the Man of the city who describes the wild, undomesticated world.
It is these spaces outside the walls which, by stigmatizing it, lead the city dweller to represent him so as not to be afraid of them.
Now countries are civilized and domesticated, well beyond horizons, with the possible exception of a few areas of primary forest, mountainous peaks or abyssal bottoms.
In the 17th century the modern man went to make his Grand Tour to discover the world with his 'Claude mirror'.
Now the modern traveler leaves with his 'Digital Reflex' to reproduce the image of the catalog of his tour operator.
The dark forests invade the frescoes of the Roman villas.
The landscape is now autonomous, it is its own subject, it is no longer
the backer of the history of men.
The world is a Luna-park for tour operators that produces 'beautiful image' for tourists
In both cases, there is a search for the model or an ideal, but in the second, the imaginary is reduced to duplication.
