Duographie retraces ten years of the creation of the artist duo Pétrel I Roumagnac (duo), formed by Aurélie Pétrel and Vincent Roumagnac. At the crossroads of visual arts and theatre, their work explores the dialogue between photography and staging through installations with reactivation protocols and photostage pieces. Since 2013, they have been designing creations that evolve in accordance with their exhibition environment, questioning the conventions of the visibility of works, both in space and time. Each of the pieces presented by the duo is constantly moving in its exhibition space, evolving between latency time, reserve space and redistribution in space, according to successive rearrangements of photographic objects and other materials that make up them. The result is hybrid installations, a contemporary object theatre with blurred temporalities, a mixture of still images, body traces and performative sculpture in perpetual movement. The book takes the position of focusing visually on de rêves, d’Astérion, and de l’Ekumen, the trilogy of photoscenic pieces created by the duo between 2016 and 2023, each offering an immersive dive into their abundant floating universe. The duophonic play in nine scenes reproduces, in a theatre format, interviews between the two protagonists, which, together with friends passing through the course of their discussion, take place throughout the work played in and for the book, and illuminating, at the heart of the words inside, the ten years of this unique work in duo.

Aurélie Pétrel’s photographic practice questions the status of the image, its use and the mechanisms of its production. Anchored in the long term, her research aims to bring shooting back to the center of multisensory reflection using spatial devices. Aurélie Pétrel poses the question of the mutation-mutability of an image, its potential for fractalization, not only in itself but also in what it can cause as a disturbance in her experience of pluriperception. For her, a shot generates a multitude of shots from different points of view. Time and space are constantly superimposed, while they continue to disintegrate. The moving image is redistributed and its subsequent metamorphoses thus outweigh its consensual absorption, its one and definitive perception, its decisive moment and position. Implementing the formal tools and intellectual processes of both artists and researchers, Pétrel combines a visual and conceptual approach in a programmatic series of situations, where the exhibition format replays each time differently, the interpretative dimension of any score, any photograph in latency, any form waiting for metamorphosis. Her work is part of the collection of the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne (CH); of the Centre National d’Art Moderne (MNAM)–Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), of the FRAC Normandie Rouen and of the FRAC Occitanie Montpellier…

Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Algeria… In this deeply personal work, Jean-Christophe Béchet looks back thirty-five years on his first steps as a young photographer. This long-term work (three years of immersion), which he affectionately calls “my African years”, should have been his first book, but his personal and photographic life decided otherwise.

Few images circulated, the majority having remained in archive boxes all these years. Today, he has reworked his selection, seeking to find a new rhythm. He notes: “As we age, images change their status, some memories fade, others take over, some images take on greater force, others become repetitive and a little ‘cliché’. You have to be able to navigate between a kind of nostalgia (inevitable, since photography is also the art of the past) and a desire to build a contemporary work with photographs that are more than 35 years old”.

Most of the territories featured in African Memories are no longer accessible to French or European visitors. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the countries that welcomed him so warmly with his backpack, are now closed places. This book is a vibrant tribute to Africa from a passionate photographer.

In 2003, in the singular setting of the ghost town of Cook, Australia, Laurent Mulot “implanted” the first Middle of Nowhere Contemporary Art Center with the only two inhabitants of this small town. This book is a monograph looking back on more than 20 years of research and encounters around the world, which gradually enabled the author to collaborate with astrophysicists on the notion of the “Middle of Nowhere”.

The work was analyzed by contemporary art historian and critic Paul Ardenne.

This boxed set includes 8 items (books, leporello, posters) for an exceptional experience at the crossroads of contemporary art and archaeology. In 2014, artist Mirela Popa began a project based on the archaeological excavations carried out in Ivry Confluence, notably on the grounds of the former BHV depots, and the preventive excavation campaigns organized on sites dating from the Neolithic period, doomed to disappear due to the necessities of urban expansion. Working in close collaboration with archaeologists, the artist’s work was thus marked by an extensible chronology: from one changing territory to another, from the Neolithic to the contemporary period.

Running away into you is the first photographic book by Portuguese director Mário Macedo. In the form of an intimate testimony, this book narrates an amorous wandering that lasted almost ten years, smoky encounters and parties between Zagreb, Berlin, Copenhagen or Lisboa, like snapshots from an European youth trying to slow down the rhythm of our capitalist societies. 

This photographic work is a testimony to American gang culture that glorifies easy money, mistrust towards authorities and wild flirt. Through the months that Souhayl A spend in Florida, he tried to document and decipher from within the daily life of Sex, Money, Murder, one of the world most violent gang. 

For several years, Sylvie Bonnot has been conducting an artistic and documentary research on French forests, gathering images in mainland France and French Guiana. The wide gaps that characterizes both of the lands are linked here to show the complex reality of landscapes and the industry. « From the near forest, in Burgundy and Savoie, she tried to measure and transcribe human confrontation, in both the forestry and the hydroelectric development. […] she puts forward the flora, fauna, humanity relationship in its untamed condition. Machines and installations come together with the organic world in a brutal way yet always poetic, crossed by a serpent molt, and fleeing animality. Under that name (molt), Sylvie Bonnot transforms photographic prints for about a decade, by pulling away the gelatin on which the image was formed, from the paper, to give birth to an hybrid world ». (Excerpt from a text by Sophie Eloy and François Michaud). The book opens on a wide ensemble of « molts », photographic creation crafted on a strong documentary research on the differents state of nowadays forest exploitation. It resumes on what is called a small atlas of the forest, enabling the lector to discover and follow the documentary research that allows the artist to form her body of work. 

Doutes is a journey between Marseille, where André Mérian lives, and Avignon, where he often meets his partner between 2019 and 2021. All the photographs that make the book have been taken in places, interiors, landscapes daily crossed by the artist. Sidewalks, just like living room tables, become scenes on which the objects arrange themselves in precarious balances as the day and the colors go by. Carried away by the flow of situations, André Mérian manages to ceize micro-landscapes, involuntary sculptures and broken chips of reality. From this common space, he succeeds in taking the eye away from the beaten path. 

What is « modernity » if not having no other preoccupation but to straightforwardly face the object, daring to see what we see ? For that aim, the horizontal format of the photographs imposed itself, as well as a telephoto lens as photographic optic. And then, formulated from the outset, a title, a book, and a given time — this of the third covid 19 pandemy-linked lockdown, in 2021. What here acts, is the relationship between, the photographic space and reality, that is, the distance set between the operator and the object. To obtain a new image of reality is to speak of it in a renewed manner. Art in general and photography in particular are a matter of belief. There is an event when the object representation (the image) and the relationship to the subject (the spectator) are intertwined. At what point are we really engaging with History ?