Galerie Madé presents the exhibition Nature by Alexandre Silberman as part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival.
Here, not far from Paris, there were marshlands, which became the market‑garden plain of one of Europe’s largest agricultural territories.
Between 1952 and 1972, Gypsies from Andalusia settled there, but also Roma from Eastern Europe, Portuguese, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Yugoslavs, as well as a few French families living in unsanitary conditions in what was called the shantytown of La Campa.
Now one seems to experience there that “feeling of nature” so dear to the Surrealists, the same feeling that Aragon’s peasant sensed when he walked through the Parc des Buttes‑Chaumont, to the north of the capital.
Like the latter, the Parc de La Courneuve was invented built from scratch. Spreading across five municipalities, it imposes its opulent landscape upon the raw, dry one of the Parisian outskirts.
Vast plains, belvederes, mounds and pyramids: everything is designed to reclaim a perspective freed from the housing blocks that score the view just a few steps away visible here only at a distance, rendered tiny by the power of these mineral vantage points.
If NATURE exists here, it is through a double play of language: first, that which is fenced, landscaped, structured by landscape architects and then reinterpreted by its occupants. Here dense vegetation and stone sculptures, dark woods and clear paths, the modernity of practices and the primitive power of trees confront and intermingle.
Through the park’s constitutive duality, the inner force of those who cross it is revealed. An enclosed space yet a space of freedom, it creates its autonomy and aesthetic independence both through its porosity entry is free and open and through its opacity.
In the silence of the place, contemporaneity sinks into this hybrid space as into an original reverse side, creating an asynchronous tableau where the real becomes fable. And then “are faithfully reflected the vast sentimental territories where the wild dreams of city‑dwellers move.”
“Everything that remains in adults of the atmosphere of enchanted forests,
everything that still participates in them in the habit of miracles,
everything that breathes in their breath a scent of fairy tales,
under the poor, demented appearance of these weakly invented landscapes is revealed.”
Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris
Alexandre Silberman—born in 1983 in Dortmund, Germany is a filmmaker and photographer based in Paris. A graduate in philosophy and communication, he chiefly develops long‑term documentary projects suffused with the omnipresence of dream and with the practice of portraiture.
His work was notably distinguished with the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize in 2023, and in December 2024 his first monograph, titled NATURE, was published.
Alexandre Silberman : Nature
6–29 November 2025
Galerie Madé
30 rue Mazarine
75006 Paris
01 53 10 14 34
www.galeriemade.com
