Until November, Jean-Marc Tingaud exhibits his images at the archaeological museum of Mont Beuvray. This exhibition, entitled FRAGMENTS, Notebook of a proto-archaeologist, here is how he presents it.
Since the relatively recent origin of photography – what is 193 years in the history of humanity that could be 7 million? – men have never ceased to wonder: nature, animals, other men, to find food, shelter, heat, the deities, the living, the dead, love, war, peace, good, evil, earth, sky, wind, water streams, streams, rivers and the oceans, grass fires and lightning, snow and ice, the rumblings from the depths of the earth …
They have never stopped documenting, commenting, arguing and testifying. But how to transmit when one has to invent everything, to go from borborygma to language, from the formless cry to the identified song, from the improbable trait to the mastered drawing, from the soft clay to the completed form?
Suffice to say that the proposal made to me by Laïla Ayache to exhibit within the collections of the Museum of Bibracte impressed me, not to say stupefied me. These rooms, I have traveled many times, mostly with family, often accompanied by friends of our children. I like the site, the beautiful nature that surrounds it, the architecture of Pierre Louis Faloci, the rare clairvoyance of a President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, deciding its creation, coupled with that of a European Center of archaeological research that would bring together students from all over Europe.
Impressed surely, until I realized that by inviting me to exhibit my works in relation to the discoveries constituting the collections of the Museum, revealed a very strong link of kinship between the archaeologists’ research and mine.
The image chosen for the poster of the exhibition, entitled “The New Times”, was captured in an interior of East Berlin, a few months after the fall of the Wall. It shows us little, but tells us a lot about destiny, history, individual and collective often confused. She tells us that one day, a family has crossed the ruins of the forbidden yesterday to buy on the other side a simple quartz clock, intended to replace, in the same place on the wall, a wooden clock , the mechanism that we go back with a key and its balance that ticks. They had inherited from their parents who lived there, before the construction of the Wall.
This photograph tells us that one fine morning, in Berlin, a clock, undoubtedly a little sad to have been dethroned, has maliciously left its trace, in silence …
Sign of the times …
Jean-Marc Tingaud – Fragments
Until November 11, 2019
Bibracte
Mont Beuvray
71990 Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray
