Anne-Françoise Pelissier: Beirut or the silence of the gods
Anne-Françoise Pelissier, familiar with Beirut, photographed the city from the middle of the 1990s, at a time when the withdrawal of the militias marked the end of a long civil war on confessional background. His images show with force how much visual intensity has nothing to do with pathos. Nothing more serene in appearance than this world after the battle. The sea is slack, supremely indifferent.
On the deserted shore, some long useless parasols cut the horizon from their derisory verticals. Even the ships are moored. The sky is uniform, too. He never seemed more empty. The day after the violence is the time of the indifference of the gods. The battle memory is part of one of the most common places in the image of war: a wall riddled with impacts, whose coating has fallen. Everything was not knocked down or destroyed: a big wheel, a memory of days happy, sees himself everywhere, motionless. But the rich heritage of one of the most beautiful capitals of the Mediterranean paid a heavy price; a marble pilaster overturned becomes a metonymy of all the gutted or destroyed villas.
On the Beirut of Anne-Françoise Pelissier floats an extraordinary silence – a silence of Holy Saturday. The total loneliness seems to reign.
Concrete, steel, vegetal too: these are the actors, arranged according to the laws austere geometry. We think of the tall bare walls of Lewis Baltz, with less of Jansenist systematism, however. Even in the absence of men, looks, and voices, Pelissier keeps alive a form of vibration, as in these places abandoned where we have the strange feeling that someone has just passed. Could it be a ghost, under a light canvas like the one that covers the palaces? A sleeping workman? This world that is self-surrendered but not devoid of promises is par excellence a poetic world.
Text Guillaume de Sardes
22 unique vintage prints, argentic. 30X40 format made between 1997 and 2000
by the Publimod laboratory of the Rue du Roi de Sicile in Paris.
Film cameras / Pentax 6X7, Leica M6 and Polaroid 180
Anne-Françoise Pelissier: Fragment
Familiar with Beirut, I photographed the city in the mid-1990s, at a time when the withdrawal of the militias marked the end of a long civil war on a confessional background.
I drew the portrait of a strange city, Beirut a capital in perpetual movement, in eternal evolution. Difficult to translate the fascination, difficult to describe a frenzied and fervent city, attractive and scary, harassing and dense. To give an identity of this city, I met and photographed men, Lebanese artists who, in the wake of a collective trauma, took the maquis and chose creation to fight the evils of war.
They are the representatives of a new generation. They are going through the present, split the thought, build the future. Architect, artist, dancer, musician, photographer, designer, graphic designer, fashion designer … resistant in their own way, who shape their domain, a tepid and enlightened Beirut, secret and impulsive. I photographed them in a fragment of their territory, their intimacy in the city; their silhouettes appear as “punctuations” an open theater, a liberated and reborn Lebanon.
Through their art, they turn the wheels of a machine to upset the social and political system. I paced the city, touched the scars behind the metamorphosis, measured all the subtleties of the capital mother.
I understood that time does not erase history as it did not erase stigmas of the year 2006. Beirut, multi-denominational city of the world Arabic, knows how to cultivate the democratic and artistic process.
Through my encounters, I am confused to a city where everything is too beautiful, too ugly, too good, too violent …
I wanted to take a step back, let myself be caressed by an air as sweet as hot, enter a setting that, at every street corner, pops up and escapes, soaking up an atmosphere that slips between the fingers, trying to seduce a muse balancing and schizophrenic, a whore redone, remaquillée and excessive must take as she gives herself, until feeling completely dispossessed.
Anne-Françoise Pelissier
Print on Fine Art paper 30X40 after scan done by the laboratory
Picto Bastille.
Edition limited edition of 8 copies, signed and numbered by the artist.
Polaroid case 180. Polaroid 665 B & W.
Black and white film high resolution positive / negative.
GALERIE BASIA EMBIRICOS
14, rue des Jardins Saint-Paul, 75004 Paris
