A Black Matter : fictions réelles
With the help of digital simulations and massive telescopes peering into the depths of space, the future of our universe has never been more present, at least in our imagination.
But for the astronomer, as we are reminded by Patricio Guzman, director of the masterly documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010), “the only real time is that which comes from the past. The light of the stars takes hundreds of thousands of years to reach us. That is why astronomers are always looking back, to the past.”
In A Black Matter, however, photographer Grégoire Eloy has turned his gaze to the scientists themselves. At the invitation of F93, a cultural center in Seine-Saint-Denis just outside of Paris, Eloy spent five months exploring the daily lives of these men and women—astronomers, astrophysicists and other researchers—who travel through the past and future of the universe without ever leaving their lab.
“I know nothing about science,” wrote Eloy, who is more accustomed to reporting on Europe and Asia than the cosmos. “Here I am at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and I can’t find anything to photograph.” Soon, that “nothing” found an echo in his conversations with the researchers. They talked of vacuums and the secular ether that fills our universe: dark matter, which, emitting no light, is invisible, and said to be five times more abundant than known and observable matter. “The banality of the place soon became of a promise of the infinite field it contained,” Eloy continued. “I wanted to identify the fictional aspect of the story, and bring to light the enigma.”
Eloy joined the scientists in their search, observing, investigating, discussing, collecting data and clues, and presenting his findings first in a series of around 75 images posted online from March to July 2010, then with a monumental photographic mural displayed on the façade of the IAP a few months later during the annual Fête de la Science, and finally in the form of a book as enigmatic as its subject, A Black Matter.
Fittingly bound in black, without captions or commentary, this editorial UFO captivates the reader in a game of mirrors that is part scientific investigation and part police investigation, part science and part science-fiction.
Miriam Rosen
Read the full article on the French version of Le Journal.
Grégoire Eloy
A Black Matter
Editorial and artistic manager : Gösta Flemming/Journal
Designer : Johan Lindberg
Coordination : Florise Pagès
Edition : Journal, Stockholm/F93, Montreuil, 2012
24 x 30 cm, 104 pages
1 000 copies
ISBN : 978-91-980405-1-7
Diffusion: [email protected]
