“Intimate Revolts” is an exhibition project and an artist’s book that brings together several photographic series produced over the past ten years. Built with the collaboration of participants of long interviews, these staged photographs are attempts to occupy spaces of resistance.
“It is said that intimacy is linked to the art of talking about life, and it is precisely this art that Aurore Valade summons in her project. That’s why her point of departure could only be that of conversation: to know means to go with the other, to develop a path together, and that is where the collaborative practice between the artist and those she photographs. Aurore Valade thus explores a “liberated intimacy” from the desire to share the voice and to listen to other voices that claim the exceptionality of each life, because this life is always and each time the only one that offers itself to live . Each of her photographs shows a shared space that concentrates and deploys this irreducible and excessive vitality. This is why Aurore Valade wanted to explore this precise space in which the intimate is in constant tension with the political, where its liberation is always transgressive and lives in the very heart of the revolt. ”
Daniel Lesmes, curator of the exhibition
Winner at the Rencontres de la photo d’Arles in 2017 and 2018, Aurore Valade is an artist member of the Casa de Velázquez, Academy of France in Madrid.
She demonstrates that she knows how to conquer what we all want and that almost no one gets: time to listen, time to observe, to appreciate what defines her characters, to capture the words that float around them, and accompany them everywhere imperceptibly. This is a very singular faculty, because most of us are convinced that we do not have the time, and by the way, when we manage to get it, we do not know what to do with it, we do not know how to make it fertile.
The derisory condition of the modern woman-man leads us to move from one sensation to another, in a way that makes our understanding of things as banal as ephemeral. Our taste for the sensational also prevents us from being able to appreciate what is truly worth it. This research and this ability to appreciate what is truly worthwhile is the very foundation of Aurore’s work, in her portraits of people who have something to say or in her shots of advertising that, beyond the hustle and bustle produced by the accumulation of messages and advertisements, seem to tell us something, otherwise we could not or we should not really live.
Jordi Claramonte
Aurore Valade
May 13 to July 4
LUX Scène nationale
36 Bd General de Gaulle
26000 Valencia
