French-Ivorian photographer François-Xavier Gbré produced the “Radio Ballast” series as part of the Latitudes programme, of which he is the first laureate. The work was exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 2025, and will tour to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York in 2026 and Côte d’Ivoire in 2027.
An accompanying volume is co-published by Atelier EXB and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.
François-Xavier Gbré is drawn to traces. For the past fifteen years or so, he has been photographing the imprints of human activity on the landscape and architecture of the African continent. In 2024, as part of the Latitudes support programme developed by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, he set out to follow the railway that runs from north to south through Côte d’Ivoire. The line was built during the French colonial era to extract the country’s natural resources and transport them to the port of Abidjan, and from there to mainland France. Gbré’s photographs are infused with a kind of latent historicity made up of multiple temporal layers: the colonial period, the post-independence years, and more recent events.
“Radio Ballast” is the title of the project. ‘Radio’ refers to the on-board communication device used by train drivers, while ‘ballast’ is the bed of crushed rock on which the rails lie. In railway jargon, the term also refers to rumours of uncertain origin: vague, unfounded news, a mixture of assumptions and gossip, interwoven and often contradictory narratives. It’s easier to imagine that such rumours come from the tracks themselves. History often resembles such a rumour.
It is never simple, but rather diverse, intertwined, or diffracted. It is up to the artist to propose forms of synthesis.
This is precisely what François-Xavier Gbré has sought to depict here.
Clément Chéroux Curator of the exhibition
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
François-Xavier Gbré : Radio Ballast
Until January 11, 2026
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79, rue des Archives
75003 Paris
http://www.henricartierbresson.org
Atelier EXB
https://exb.fr/
Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org
