In progress

Father Alberto Maria Agostini (1883-1960) is a singular explorer. A mountaineer from Piemont (Italia), he went on a mission to Tierra del Fuego to attack the peaks and glaciers and meet the last Indians of the Strait of Magellan.

Andes patagonicos viajes de exploracion a la cordillera patagonica austral is a volume of 437 pages, abundantly illustrated. It appeared in 1941 and will be the subject of multiple editions in various languages. This makes it an essential bibliographic reference on Patagonia. The equally rare 1945 edition is made up of numerous photographic photographic plates in blue monochrome and black and white. The book is beautifully manufactured with a rare quality of folding for panoramas that sometimes reaches more than a meter.

It’s in the folds of the volume that I went to make these images.

In progress

In progress

There is Maradona, Messi and … Francisco P. Moreno and I would not like to forget famous writers Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Juarroz, who are real landmarks on my way.

In short, Francisco Pascacio Moreno gave his name to a village, to a lake sometimes named Argentino, sometimes Moreno and to the famous glacier in southern Patagonia, a true tourist icon and media emblem of the fight against global warming. Francisco Moreno (1852-1919) is a famous explorer-researcher who all his life surveyed the Andes from Bolivia to southern Argentina.

I saw one of his works in one of the oldest bookstores in Buenos Aires, justly well known to the great Argentine writers.

In 1898, he published Preliminary notes on an excursion to the territories NEUQUEN, RIO NEGRO, CHUBUT and SANTA CRUZ.

This volume includes a map and 42 black and white plates with several fold-out views to show the spectacular panoramas of northern Patagonia.

I chose to highlight a few details…, to get to the bottom of the ink.

A traduire en en_us : Sercq

«« But today, Odysseus must take real, rather than the sailor’s jacket, a dressing gown,
as was written long ago Giorgio Bergamini, and venture into the library as well as among the lost islands;
The modern Ulysses must be an expert to the remoteness of the myth
and exile of nature, an explorer of the absence and desertion of real life. »»
Pedrag Madvejevitch, Mediterranean Breviary.

In September, sailing from one island to another, under the sun, we approach the earth,
with, turn the story of Homer and in front of the coastline which runs above the water.
Like Ulysses, « I was looking without seeing and my eyes tired to search the misty recesses of the rock. » (Homère. Odyssey, XII, 233).
The vision in water level makes it difficult to reconnaissance,
a shelter here, there a password or the mouth of a canal.
The loneliness of a man, a rock or an island lost at sea, undergoing a violent storm
arising in the night, accept the « no wind » and deviate from our route,
here’s what I take from the Iliad and Odyssey and our journey at sea
The Epic of Ulysses is pending in the reverie of rocks, clouds and sea.
In parallel to the scientific work, so I chose to conduct further research on the landscape.
It seems relatively unchanged since antiquity and can be seen as the benchmark of a thousand-year history.
The result is a photographic route between land and sea, where the camera, like the Cyclops,
records the persistence of bitter immutable natural rocks, reefs, caves and cliffs, or the thread of water, one that separates out the stem of the boat which is tied again later in our wake..

A traduire en en_us : Sicile

Two years in a row, I went to the Atacama desert (Chile) to look for meteorites, but I was that the point.

Let’s say I went astray, dreaming of a stone falling from the sky. Billions of stones in the desert like so many stars in the sky. Scan the sky and feel it tilt, scan the ground with a slow walk. Looking to the left, looking for the right, lift your eyes to regain your balance by leaning on the horizon, there where the part of the sky is the clearest, below this leaden sky of such a blue dense.

Walk towards a dark stone protruding from the ground, follox indentations, descend small ravines, set foot on a smooth ledge where the water crept in perhaps millions of years ago. I’m not walking from stone to stone, I walk as far as the eyes can see, with a wind coming from eveywhere. Like the sailor, I also sail upwind, I watch the sun’s course, I take my shadow as my reference point. A frank an dark shadow.

I keep the shadow behind my back and walk in front of the light to prevent my shadow from entering the field of view. Observing at the zenith is still the best and so much the better because it stays there almost 3-4 hours in winter. Here many stones are covered with a patina wich gives the impression that the rock has been scorched by the sun and the weather, in a suffering that seems unimaginable to us.

Even in a favorable area as it is, the immensity of the desert and the smallness of our travels on a line make an encounter with the meteorites almost improbable. We walk, our gaze riveted to the ground near our feet and a few meters in front, sweeping the ground from right to left like a windshield wiper. We go forward, always hoping that the next will be the right one. How many times have I thought I encountered a stone from heaven. I stooped? Have I weighed? took the magnet out of my pocket? Then reject the stone? … an insane number of times. And then I surely walked by in a few inches, deep in thought or attracted to that other stone right over there…to the other side.

Yes the meteorite exist, it is a stone incomparable to any other. Where the surface and structure of other is grainy, layered, brittle, angular, bulbous, conglomerated, jagged, the meteorite is coated with a molten crust polished in its fall, by the lightning of it’s entry into the atmosphere, the by the timpe wich completed its form. For science, it would be necessary to cut a slice of it wich would be carried in a laboratory, measured, authenticated, classified.

Whether you are a simple fan of James Bond (Quantum of Solace) or passionate about astrophysics, Cerro Paranal (2635m) is a name that thunders between imagination and science. It is the possibility of opening the sky…

The first nights in the Atacama desert but like all those spent in the deserts bind us to the sky in a special way. It is obviously a spiritual relationship: Earth-Man-Sky. An intuitive resonance.

Lying in my sleeping bag, the sky revolves around the polar star and I try to locate myself in this southern hemisphere sky where I will have to wait until morning to recognize a few stars or constellations. I admit, I don’t know much about it, but I like stories about the sky and those who know how to tell the stars. I take an indestructible Hubert Reeves pocket book with each trip where I know that I keep linking the same pages. The stars were yellow, as if stuck on a solid blue background were a little phosphorescent but they had lost their power.

I begin to fall asleep remembering a night « under the stars » in Brittany, during a heat wave period. I hoped that my children, then small, fall asleep under the sky. A false good idea: « I can not close my eyes he replied, it is too beautiful ». The sky shone with all its starlight and we were all wide-eyed.

I never imagined setting foot in a hotbed of astrophysical science. I had the curiosity several times to plunge my eye into a telescope, but entering a heavenly temple such as this was unthinkable before this second trip to the Atacama. The chance of a meeting allowed us to enter there in privileged conditions and to discover these fabulous machines.

« Oscuro es maravilloso » (darkness is marvelous) is written on the access door to the control room of the VLT (very large telescope) of the Paranal observatory, one of the largest in the European southern observatory (ESO) installed around the year 2000. The VLT is made up of 4 telescopes. Each has a code name UT1 to UT4, in the Mapuche language it is Antu (the Sun), Kueyen (the Moon), Melipal (the Southern Cross) Yepun (Venus). In each of them is placed a mirror 8.20 m in diameter, each bearing the first name of one of the Dalton Brothers (Lucky Luke).

Here, we do not observe the sky with a laser beam launched in the Milky Way and with the aid of an optical system which takes measurements by interference between the waves from Infra red to Ultra violet (interferometry). In other words, we observe the invisible in the imperceptible. This is where the closest black hole to earth was observed. The black hole hidden within the HR 6819 system is one of the very first stellar mass black holes discovered to date that does not interact violently with its environment and, as a result, appears truly black to us.

https://www.eso.org/public/france/news/eso2007/

In the evening, we set up our camp further down in the desert facing this mountain drawn by the silhouette of the telescopes. The next morning and like every day our eyes roam the ground in our search for a stone that has fallen from the sky.

Chacabuco has no smell. The heat crushes its tin roof or what is left or it… Former miner’s quarters planted in the desert at the beginning of the 20 th century, and near the salitreras, from which potassium nitrate is extracted.

Chacabuco was transformed into a concentration camp under the Pinochet’s regime in 1973. On the walls are superimposed traces of the stories that haunt the place. Yhe grids of the streets contrasts with the ruins of these dwellings. under a stifling heat, xe seek life in this crisscrossed city, theses abandoned buildings between shadow and I light.

In Pedro di Valdivia, life came to an abrupt end when in 1996 the government decided to end the activity of the salpetre factory. Inaugurated in 1931, the dusty and noisy dispensary founded by Guggenheim quickly had more than 6000 workers with their families and life was organized in that became a city with its town hall, its schools, it’s social housing, its hospital, its swimming pool, its football field…

Today, Pedro di Valdivia, named after the famous explorer, is no more than a ghost town where but not far away remains the dusty cloud of the last salitreras where the workers have shouted at each other for decades in silence.

We find on the site work contract books and the worker’s heath bulletin…

Hernàn Riveira Letelier (chilian) as writed La reina Isabel cantaba rancheras (The Queen Isabel Sang Mexican Music) where he describes the living conditions of these famlilies. Magnificent book.

On the road to Tocopilla, after passing the impressive mines Michilla, we come across small roads that lead to the sea. While I was looking for an open restaurant, I took one of these that led me to Cobija. It is often thus the dscoveries…

Formely Cobija was a rather active Bolivian city. Today Chilean, it has now become a village of almost nothing, pebble, sheets and nets, it has become the refuge of some fifty fischermen ans seaweed harvesters. Cobija preserves the ruins of adobe houses all destroyed by a violent eathquake and tsunami in 1870s. Cobija preserves the traces of en architecture of an activity of a time that does not go back so long but that the winds of the desert have worn away.

I discovered this landscape when I was working as an exhibition curator on the collection of the early 20th century photographer Emile Vigne. I often visited the region, and was used to this landscape of moorland and forest. The devastating storm (Klauss) hit the Landes on 25 January 2009. Shortly after the storm, I returned to the area and was suddenly struck by the bareness of the landscape and the appearance of the horizon, which until then had been cut by an infinite number of trees.
It was a shock to me. By day, the landscape was unbelievably brutal, hard… I remember I didn’t want to make any more images. My desire for landscape was destroyed. The blue sky and the white light of winter carved out what was left of the forest in stark realism. There was no longer any possibility of imagination in this landscape. The night would open up other perceptions of the landscape.
Vent nocturne is made up of two complementary series of images: large, almost monochrome landscapes (in colour) featuring the ghostly silhouettes of ‘resistant’ trees, and a series of photographs showing portraits of stumps blown over by the wind. What was underground comes to light, and a world of roots rises to the surface.

fload

In the winter of 2006, the Loire rose out of its bed and caused a small stream to swell more than usual.
The water flirted with the foothills of the small village of Bonny sur Loire (43) and drowned the surrounding fields and roads.

A traduire en en_us : Chausey

In between

Molène

He never returned. One night in August, there, off the coast of Iceland dark, amid a great noise of fury had celebrated his wedding with the sea.                                                               Pierre Loti, Iceland Fisherman

Patreksfjörður, Tálknafjörður, Grundarfjörður, Fáskrúðsfjörður, Skeiðarársandur … names that have marked the history of fishing « to » Iceland; some as places frequented by Britons and Dunkirk, others have been the scene of shipwrecks and strandings.

In this story, there remains little more than a few traces: marine cemeteries, graves scattered buildings, like the old French hospitals, houses works by sea or, from objects of exchange and most of shipwrecks.
These traces have guided our course « Iceland » in March 2003 period of the year once opened six to seven months of fishing.
Among the schooners in the region Paimpolaise a hundred were lost to Iceland or two thousand men. That mark the graves of Iceland, from west to east, show these men and relationships that united during one or more seasons in Iceland and Icelanders.
The portraits of objects illustrate these relationships, they talk more than they tell a story, sometimes behind the windows of a museum, sometimes in private.
These are indeed « living » in yet another object of life become, over time, the subject of family. While inviting us back in time, these objects tell us about cultural exchange and technical, and more often, the shores where they were born as objects washed up, children in a sea one day become monstrous.

Anthropology Vanessa Doutreleau

publishing atelier des brisants, 2012

Exhibition show in Paimpol, june- august 2003 and Alliance française, Reykjavik, june -july 2004. With Comptoir d’Islande, Ferðakompaníið et Icelandair.

Le parterre de sable
Et entre l’humanité-sable et le monde-rocher, on devine une harmonie possible comme entre deux harmonies non homogènes : celle du non humain dans un équilibre de forces qui semble ne répondre à aucun dessein ; celle des structures humaines qui aspirent à une rationalité de composition géométrique ou musicale, jamais définitive…
Italo Calvino. Collection de sable.

The winds rush, fly, swoop down, dwindle away, commence again; hover above, whistle, roar, and smile; they are frenzied, wanton, unbridled, or sinking at ease upon the raging waves.
Their howlings have a harmony of their own. They make all the heavens sonorous.
They blow in the cloud as in a trumpet; they sing through the infinite space with the mingled tones of clarions, horns, bugles, and trumpets – a sort of Promethean fanfare.
Such was the music of ancient Pan. […] They huddle the clouds together, and drive them diverse.
They mould and knead the supple waters as with a million hands.
Victor Hugo. Toilers of the Sea.

« SEA BREAD » is a literal translation from an old expression in « breton ».
It talk about a story of fishermen and farmers who where very poor.
During the past time XIX -early XX century, they worked very hard.
To make more some money, they went (often women and child), after tempest,  pick a sea weed on the beach and it was for them a possibility to buy  a little more food for family. Since a XVII century there is a special law  for a people who live in this part of Brittany. If you found something on a strand,  it’s for you and you don’t have to pay tax for that or give it back.
In this region you have a story about plunderer of wrecks that was deliberately run aground ships on the coast to take the property but it’s another story… they are many stories about stranding and drift there…
My « sea bread » series want to recall this old “practice” in Brittany which consist in everything that you can find,  you can use or transform, etc…

During several winter I have been in a small village called Porspoder ;  it’ a kind of end of world. I often like to give attention on objet which the people usually doesn’t like, touch or see. I pick the roots of a very large sea weed which was tear off by a tempest and roll in a deep ocean, during day and day. It arrived on a beach partially deformed and destroy.
The interesting thing for me is also the question of point of view on this strange form.
Sometime it appears like anthropological faces or monstrous. I don’t want to play too much with this effect, but there is something manifest, like portrait from immemorial time.

Iceland’s landscapes are renowned for their sublime character, widely praised in adventure and tourism books. Like many travellers, I felt the same way. Their presence, like their power, awakens us brutally, disproportionately, because this force goes beyond what we can imagine. There is no attraction to the ‘beautiful’ landscape, but a gentle hostility to the elements that becomes inspiring. I avoid panoramic vision and concentrate the landscape in a square. I linger on small landscapes, spaces of almost nothing, details, outcrops, materials, colours, meteoric phenomena, silences and crashes.
The uncertainty and doubt into which some of the images plunge us is linked to the loss of reference points and scale, to the appearance of strange colours – dark, earthy, dull, bright or pastel – and to the vaporous effects that cloud our perception of the earth and the fragility of the soil, sometimes hard, sometimes crumbly, soft or muddy.
His images can emanate a sense of melancholy that I believe is contained in the land itself, in its elemental, telluric nature.

During my walks, I fix my gaze not just on the horizon but on tiny, intimate fragments of the landscape, where my feet sink or stumble, where micro-territories are revealed micro-territories on the edge of the visible, unless you are face down.
Because I keep my gaze close to the ground and the edges, confronted with a loss of scale that makes the visible sensitive in a different way. Here, more than anywhere else, scale and reference points no longer have any place, leading to wandering. We move forward in one direction, while our gaze calls us elsewhere.
Accidents in the earth’s crust create viewpoints that disrupt any notion of perspective.
Just as a walker’s step wavers and becomes hesitant, so the viewer’s gaze, in turn, searches the image for points of support, but the gaze keeps slipping away… always.

Will arrive soon book

In the space of the hesitant indefinite stands the ‘without qualities’, the ‘without absolute determination‘. Anne Cauquelin. A short treatise on the ordinary garden.

Materia Prima evokes both the process of creation and that of destruction. A world that collapses or bursts into flames, in a perpetual state of flux and re-creation…
This series of photographs was taken in Iceland. Here there is no exalted nature in the usual sense. No exuberant vegetation, no paradisiacal landscapes sheltering a fertile nature, a growing flora and fauna. Here is the earth, in all its infinity and majestic poverty, sometimes violent and hostile to man. I remember reading in a magazine on the plane that was taking me there for the first time, the word « Inhabitable land » written in the centre and across the width of the map of Iceland, because here we are, in the open air, on the backbone of the earth. The rock is rough or crumbly and draws lines and surfaces, while water, ice and tumultuous currents spread across its hollows and peaks. Discovering this world is like plunging back into the origins of creation… a land where everything is in perpetual motion and change, unstable on a scale beyond that of man, in its temporality or physical nature.

Ancient texts tell us:
It was at the beginning of time,
When nothingness reigned.
There was neither sand nor sea,
Nor icy waves.
No earth existed,
Nor the sky above.
Immense was the abyss,
But no plant grew.
The Edda, Norse mythology. Volupsa. Version by Snorri Sturluson.

Materia Prima

Simplement suivre la goutte d’eau

Surtsey, The shape of an island

Look at the book, Surtsey la forme d’une île, 2020. éditions Creaphis. (only in french)

https://www.editions-creaphis.com/fr/catalogue/view/1238/surtsey/?of=6

It was at the origin of time, While reigned the nothingness. Neither sand, nor sea had there, Nor ice-cold waves. Neither the earth, Nor the very high sky existed. Immense was the abyss, But no plant grew.
Edda

On Surtsey – watch video 40′ : https://youtu.be/EAxmV_cWAFA

Surtsey. Situated in the South of Iceland, Surtsey is an island, appeared from streams on November 14th, 1963 further to a submarine eruption. Since, it does not stop resisting in the ocean, in the assaults of the violent winds which sweep these regions of the Atlantic Ocean the North, and to the people.

The place

Surtsey is a short-lived place; an uninhabited place; a protected place; a said place; and as many islands: a wished place.

Real laboratory of the Creation, Surtsey is the island of the scholars, or rather, the island of the knowledge. Eden of the thought, it does not attract that the scientists; it is today as ethnologist and photographer that we are interested in it in turn. In the continuation of works realized previously on the notion of place (cf. book and exhibition The island Carn), Surtsey imposed upon us as an evidence. its uncertain, imperceptible character, in fact in a sense paradigm of islands, and it is also this fragility of the place, as what we are going to be able to find there, which attracts us and motivates this project.

Ethnographic survey : Vanessa Doutreleau.

Extracts interviews: Borgþór Magnússon, Erling Ólafsson, Lovísa Ásbjörnsdóttir, Karl Gunnarsson, Sturla Friðriksson, Árni Johnsen, Þorunn Bára Björnsdóttir. Enquête ethnographique : Vanessa Doutreleau

– « þegar ég fór út í Surtsey það var svona, « ah ég er búin að sjá svo mikið af kort og myndum, ég þekki það bara út og inn »… en það sem komir á óvart var all of miklu miklu stærra ; litirnir, og lyktin og hljóðin og all þetta… (…) það var svo indislegt ! ég segi stundum að það er eins og ég hef orðinn ástfangin ! »
« En allant sur Surtsey, j’avais l’impression de la connaître avant d’y aller tellement j’avais travaillé sur des images avant, des cartes etc. Mais ce qui était surprenant en y allant, c’est que tout était tellement plus grand, les couleurs plus vives, les sons, les odeurs… Tellement beau ! Je dis parfois que c’est comme si j’étais comme tombée amoureuse ! »
– « There are many truths. If you go to see the island it’s one truth. I don’t need to go to the island at the moment ; I would be probably disappointed ! Maybe I want to go to see inside the island which is in my head, before I see the outside of it . It’s more I want to have my island, my imagination (…) it’s like a package, you only see the package, you don’t see what’s inside of it. »
– « Eg fylgst með svo langan tíma, að það er svona hluti af sjálfur mér. Og ég er búin að ganga um alla eyjuna, og veit hvað hún hefur upp að bjóða ,en samt hún er að breytast, hún er að minnka. (…) Það er alltaf spenandi að koma aftur að sama stað til að sjá hvort hann hefur breyst og hvern hann hefur breyst. þegar við komum í Surtsey thað var ströndin alltaf sem breyst mjög mikið ; við erum alltaf að skoða nýja strönd, og sama á botninum, það er aldrei sami staðurinn. »
« J’y vais depuis tellement longtemps que c’est comme une partie de moi, je suis allé partout sur l’île, donc je sais ce qu’elle peut offrir, et en même temps elle change tout le temps, rétrécit. C’est toujours excitant de retourner sur un même lieu pour voir comment et où il a changé. On ne voit jamais la même plage, et pareil en bas, sous l’eau, ce n’est jamais pareil, jamais le même lieu. »

– « For me, this island is not only an island. It’s a representation, a symbol. A symbol of life, with strength and fragility … here now, gone tomorrow, like life is, but always comes back . »
– « Well, Surtsey is my favorite project. That’s as simple as that. And Surtsey is my favorite spot on earth. That’s as simple as that ! »
– «Surtsey, it’s like meeting an old friend that you go to visit every year »
– « Á þennan dag þegar Surtseyjar gosey byrjaði var ég 11 ár gamall og ég mann eftir því að Mamma mín, hún segðu okkur krökkunum að það var að byrja eldgósum í Vestmanneyjar. Það var soldið snjó koma, og sást ekki út til eyja, það var ekki gott skyggni, við sáum ekki neitt eldgos . En Mamma hún fór eins og gert var í gamla daga, og fór hún út með disk, hvíttan disk, mata disk, og set hann út , og svo snjóaði í diskinn, og svo tók hún diskinn inn um kvöldin, til að athuga hvort hefur komin einhver aska ; það hafa gerir folk líka í gamla daga út af kindunum og hestunum þeir mátt ekki borða ösku, það var ekki gott. Svo tók hún disk inn með snjóunum og svo það var bara vatn og soldið aska á diskinn. Og það var það fyrsta sem ég mann, fyrsta sem ég sá umerkið um af Surtseyjargos ; aska á diskinn »
«Quand Surtsey est entrée en éruption j’avais 11 ans, et je me souviens que ma mère nous a dit qu’une éruption commençait aux îles Vestmann. Il tombait un peu de neige, aussi on ne voyait pas les îles, il n’y avait pas de visibilité, et on ne voyait aucune éruption .Mais ma mère a fait comme on faisait avant ; elle a pris une assiette, une assiette blanche, l’a mise dehors, sur laquelle neige tombait, et elle l’a rentrée le soir à l’intérieur afin de voir s’il y avait de la cendre dedans. C’est ainsi que faisaient les gens autrefois afin que les moutons et les chevaux ne mangent pas de la cendre, c’était très mauvais. Puis elle a pris l’assiette avec la neige, et il ne restait alors plus que de l’eau et un peu de cendre dans l’assiette. C’est le premier souvenir marquant que je garde de l’éruption de Surtsey ; cette cendre dans l’assiette. »
– « I was a boy scout when I was youngster, looking for jewlerry somewhere, and trying to find something new or remarquable, and when I went to Surtsey, I had the same feeling that I would be looking after, not a gold, but hunting something new, like a new plant, a new insect or new bird. I was on a treasure island. »
– « Birds life is always making a new picture every year. It’s like to see sculpture with the life. It’s always interesting to see how the island is changing, (…) like a person, his character is changing. »
– « It was also interesting when the second eruption started, then it opened like with a knife when you open the skin ; instead of the blood there was lava, and no sound….quiet. That was the beginning of a new land. »

Foam is that by which any agitation of the liquid mass and more particularly that of the sea is revealed.
This foaming is more abundant when the agitation of the water is produced by regular rotation and not simply by surf.
What is foam ?
It is what swells, expands, becomes lighter, rises and finally separates from the water set in motion.
We are therefore considering the same process as that described of the clay placed in the potter’s hands. The plastic phenomenon of the swelling of the earth on the wheel, the process of « sublimation » it develops, froth is the equivalent of these for water and its formation is a sign of the beginning of the active phase.
What therefore is foam?
If water is by essence that which runs, moves and flows, water », it is like a sort of quintessence of water …
Jean Canteins , Divine churners

I dedicate these images to the memory of Per Pondaven, lost at sea on 1 January 2008.

skumenn is a Breton word meaning foam.

These photographs of foam were taken in France (Brittany), in Iceland and in Reunion Island.