Seminar - Photographs, Texts, Archives: Practices of the Essay
with Nina Ferrer-Gleize, the 2023 scholarship recipient, and Marielle Macé, a French essayist
Recherche & création
Amphi du Mûrier - Beaux-Arts de Paris
2 Nov. 2023
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PHOTOGRAPHS, TEXTS, ARCHIVES: Archives of the Body
Featuring Agnès Geoffray and Vanessa Desclaux, the 2023 recipients of the Fellowship, and Philippe Artières, a French historian
Seminar coordinated by Christian Joschke, art historian
While photography—freed from its status as a document—was long cultivated in the form of a painting, it now tends to return to its original modesty: souvenir images, administrative documents, family albums, catalogs of gestures, medical imagery, and archives. By exploring this economy of instrumental images, artists allow photographs to speak a language of intimate, discreet experience, closely tied to lived situations. The relationship to the written word thus takes on forms that literature has termed “documentary,” yet which are imbued with narratives, imaginations, and dreams. In the interplay between photography, text, and the archive, a poetics of the document is reenacted. Yet at the same time, it transcends the forms of the photo-text, extending into performance, installation, and inquiry.
As was the case last year, this year’s seminar will be part of the Lille Institut pour la photographie’s program to support research and artistic creation. Among other guests, we will welcome several recipients of this program’s grants. The aim will be to facilitate a dialogue between a researcher and an artist on themes related to the interplay between photography, text, and the archive.
"Archives of the Body," Thursday, November 30, in the Mûrier lecture hall, featuring:
Agnès Geoffray
Agnès Geoffray is a visual artist. Situated at the intersection of writing and photography, her work explores the survival of gestures and postures that draw on a diverse repertoire, often derived from specific archives. The concept of the body under influence, and the forms of resistance associated with them are at the heart of her research. She was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2002–2004) and a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome (2010). Solo exhibitions at the Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France, the Point du Jour, and the Frac Auvergne have been complemented by group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles, the Jeu de Paume, and the Mac Val. She has exhibited abroad at venues including the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne.
The artist is represented by Galerie Maubert in Paris and published by La Lettre volée in Brussels.
Vanessa Desclaux
Vanessa Desclaux, an independent curator and researcher, has collaborated with various institutions in Europe (Tate Modern, Bloomberg Space, de appel arts centre, CRAC Alsace, Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Frac Franche-Comté, La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec, RMN-Grand Palais, FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MECA). A professor of art education at ENSA Dijon (2011–2019), she holds a Ph. D. In Curating (Goldsmiths, London). Her dissertation explored forms of resistance to the standardization of curatorial practices in contemporary art through the concepts of passivity and fabulation.
Philippe Artières
Philippe Artières, born in 1968, is a French historian and currently a research director at the CNRS within the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues at the EHESS. He was a resident at the Villa Medici, Academy of France in Rome. He has published The Book of Guilty Lives: Autobiographies of Criminals (1896–1909), Paris, albin Michel Publishing , from the “Bibliothèque Albin Michel Histoire” series, 2000. A Seminarian Who Committed Murder: The Bladier Case, 1905 (CNRS Editions, 202) and Stories of Intimacy , CNRS Editions 2022.