On January 28th 2020, the two winners of the 4th edition of the 4 Hands Swiss Life Award – Photography and Music were announced. Édouard Taufenbach and Regis Campo‘s project Le bleu du ciel was about be presented in Arles during its opening week. Discovering this creation on the shady walls of Arles won’t be possible. It was cancelled, just like the rest of the festival. However, the project is slightly unveiled by a video.
Le bleu du ciel is a synesthetic creation around the flight of swallows, a story built on a childhood memory, playing on the idea of migration, turned into a mosaic of notes and photographs. This work initiates a thinking on the passage of time, on the representation of length, from a human point of view as well as, we could imagine, from an animal perspective, on the repetition of migrations and the fluidity of flights and circulations.
As told by Édouard Taufenbach, “I carried within me the image of these swallows lined up by the dozens on an electric wire on the eve of the new school year. One day they were there, the next day they flew off to Africa where they would spend part of the year. A few months ago, I had a sort of click watching them fly. Their aerial choreography, made up of arrhythmias, is extremely creative. “(Interview in Polka Magazine). Régis Campo’s musical composition is complementary to Taufenbach’s photographic work. Music and photography are not only juxtaposed. The two mediums surpass each other, reproducing the aerobatic exercise of swallows, playing both on images repetition and freedom of the birds’ flight.
The photographer met the musician during the release of his album Ombra Felice (2011). The project Le bleu du ciel was entirely designed and produced for the Swisslife 4 Hands Award. They both won a grant of 15 000 € to realize this project, that will later become a book by Éditions Filigranes. The modularity of the project will allow different hangings depending on the place of exhibition.
Édouard Haufenbach was born in 1988. He has been resident at the Villa Médicis (2019), he is represented by the Binôme gallery (Paris), Elisabeth Houston (New York), Spazio Nuovo (Rome), Almanaque Fotografica (Mexico City). His binôme, Régis Campo is a composer born in 1968, who studied at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris and was also resident at the Villa Médicis from 1999 to 2001.
