Winter 2014. Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris invites Thierry Girard to take up an artist’s residency on the Belval estate in the Ardennes. The place of residence is a small house next to a pond in the middle of the woods. Straightaway Thierry Girard is dreaming about a project of withdrawal and asceticism in the manner of the American writer Henry David Thoreau (Walden). On the ground, he hopes for snow and cold but he endures storm and deluge. Unable to start what he came for, he leaves the estate to reconnoitre the surrounding countryside. Passing through a village in torrential rain he notices in an empty square a modest building on the front of which is written “PARTY ROOM”. He wonders immediately, “How does it sound?”.
He is actually on the land of the fights that preceded the “dirty defeat” September 1st 1870 at Sedan. From this epiphany, he changes the direction of his project, making it a continuation of an earlier project, Undefeated Landscape (2006–2009) which was a work about the landscapes of rebellion and resistance in Limousin.
He then sits down and reflects on what the representation of a defeated land could be, knowing that the economic and social distress of the land today is another form of defeat, this one contemporary . So he photographs villages and small town that appear abandoned, often playing with the ambiguity of the words that stand out on this or that façade of a café or factory. He finds modest, but different, landscapes, from which arises a form of anxiety, but for all that he doesn’t abandon the Belval estate, photographing the damaged forest as a metaphor for a battlefield.
The long text with a poetic scansion that precedes the photographs in the book moves from Thoreau to Rimbaud: we are close to the latter’s country. Charleville, Roche, Semoy are less than 40km from the places photographed by Thierry Girard, moreover he is familiar with these forests and the Ardennes roads since he strode them in the past for an older project (White Memory, 1991) in the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud.
Thierry Girard, Party Room
Until 4th December 2016
Musée de l’Ardenne
31 Place Ducale
08000 Charleville-Mézières
France
http://www.charleville-mezieres.fr/
Book published by Loco, 35€
