The Jules & Jim Hotel in Paris is hosting the series Supernature by François Fontaine. Taken from animal documentaries and shot with an analogue Leica camera, the eighteen photographs of this Safari seem to come from a half-awake child’s dream. Chromatic and dreamlike.
I’m afraid of animals, but I need them. They are flesh and blood, my strength and my hope. I make weapons to fight them and to feed myself. From morning to night, I carry on my war, measuring at every step my power and my fragilities. We are from the same violent earth. Without yet knowing it, we weave our connections, share the storms, the darkness and occasionally the lulls. I sometimes draw them on the rock-face to tell our story, we are brothers in savageness.
I construct walls, build cities, capitals. Now on I reign over nature from which I make profits. My intelligence serves my interests, the machines protect me, I have become a modern man who has vanquished his demons. I am not afraid of the dark nor of the animals which I dominate, exploit, transform. I think that I am liberated, emancipated, always running ever faster towards the lights of the future, forgetting my primitive territory. My technological conquest is superior to the conquest of the heart, I have lost part of myself, my loneliness is profound.
My wild brothers suddenly appear in my dreams and bring me back to the fire and salt of my own earth. Blurred, multi-coloured dreams, sublime and unreal, where the wait follows the surge, the silence follows the fury, the desire follows the rest, the dawn follows the dusk. A poetic and amorous dream that I unwind like a ribbon in the wind. I become again the naked child who contemplates:the strength and beauty of those who are no longer my prey, but the witnesses who restore my missing part, myself, the human animal.
Nina Bouraoui
Nina Bouraoui is a French novelist known for her writings which broach the topics of uprooting, nostalgia for childhood, desire and homosexuality.
François Fontaine, Supernature
From 12th May to 5th July 2017
Hôtel Jules & Jim
11, rue des Gravilliers
75003 Paris
France
