1KM by Marina Caneve (Photography)

1KM
Marina Caneve

– 1 linear km long
| 10 floors
6000 residents

This series is part of my research into how to use photography in urban investigation. In Île-de-France today, the debate on whether to open the boundaries of metropolitan centers towards the suburbs is of prime importance and has been discussed for years. In this context I’ve been attracted to the rehabilitation and development of the housing complex La Caravelle at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (in the northern suburbs of Paris).

La Caravelle is a housing complex consisting of a one-kilometer-long plan built during “The Glorious Thirties” as a refuge for the myriad of people who were, at that time, looking for a place to live in France. This building was then considered an admirable plastic work designed by Jean Dubuisson.

At the beginning of the 21st century, in contrast with the ideals that led to this complex’s construction, something went wrong and the building had become an enclave estranged from the rest of the city, with one of the highest crime rates. My work focuses on the transformations of this place after the redevelopment made by Atelier Castro in 2003. I was attracted to the reorganization of these urban structures and, widely, to the ways that the complex’s connection with the city was restored.
— Marina Caneve

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Marina Caneve (1988) is a visual artist focusing on photography with an interdisciplinary approach. She graduated from the IUAV (University of Architecture in Venice) in 2013, and from the KABK (Royal Academy of Arts, Den Haag) in 2017. Caneve’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice, 2017 and 2013), La Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 2016), and the Matèria gallery (Rome, 2016).

Her dummy book Are They Rocks or Clouds?, which she is currently working on, was awarded the Cortona On The Move Prize and will be published in 2019. It was also displayed at the Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia festival, receiving the Giovane Fotografia Italiana Award. A curator, she co-founded CALAMITA/Á, a research platform focusing on catastrophes, changes, memory, and politics. Visit her website here.

Atlas (Photography)

Atlas

by Mélanie Desriaux

From Diaries 1914–1923, by Franz Kafka (trans. Martin Greenberg):

June 25, 1914. I paced up and down my room from early morning until twilight. The window was open, it was a warm day. The noises of the narrow street beat in uninterruptedly. By now I knew every trifle in the room from having looked at it in the course of my pacing up and down. My eyes had traveled over every wall. I had pursued the pattern of the rug to its last convolution, noted every mark of age it bore. My fingers had spanned the table across the middle many times. I had already bared my teeth repeatedly at the picture of the landlady’s dead husband.

Toward evening I walked over to the window and sat down on the low sill. Then, for the first time not moving restlessly about, I happened calmly to glance into the interior of the room and at the ceiling. And finally, finally, unless I were mistaken, this room which I had so violently upset began to stir. The tremor began at the edges of the thinly plastered white ceiling. Little pieces of plaster broke off and with a distinct thud fell here and there, as if at random, to the floor. I held out my hand and some plaster fell into it too; in my excitement I threw it over my head into the street without troubling to turn around. The cracks in the ceiling made no pattern yet, but it was already possible somehow to imagine one. But I put these games aside when a bluish violet began to mix with the white; it spread straight out from the center of the ceiling, which itself remained white, even radiantly white, where the shabby electric lamp was stuck. Wave after wave of the color—or was it a light?—spread out toward the now darkening edges. One no longer paid any attention to the plaster that was falling away as if under the pressure of a skillfully applied tool. Yellow and golden-yellow colors now penetrated the violet from the side. But the ceiling did not really take on these different hues; the colors merely made it somewhat transparent; things striving to break through seemed to be hovering above it, already one could almost see the outlines of a movement there, an arm was thrust out, a silver sword swung to and fro. It was meant for me, there was no doubt of that; a vision intended for my liberation was being prepared.

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Born in 1981 in La Rochelle, Mélanie Desriaux lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts (Rennes, France, 2006), and completed the Higher Competitive Exam in Education and the Visual Arts, with Photography as a major subject (Aix-en-Provence, France, 2010). Mélanie Desriaux now shows her work in France and abroad. From 2006 to 2012, she exhibited her work at Le Radar Gallery (Bayeux, France), Art & Essai Gallery (University of Rennes 2, France), and the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Her photographs of the prison of Saint-Martin (Ré island, France) were selected by Carceropolis and are regularly published by the Prison International Observatory. In 2015, she won a scholarship for a wandering photographic tour in the United States. A year later, she was selected by Pascal Amoyel to exhibit her work on the Oregon Trail in Bowen Island (Vancouver, Canada) for FotoFilmic // PULP Gallery & Store. Her work is published by C41 and Camera Infinita, among other outlets. Visit her website here.

Alain Greloud (Photography)

Hôtel de la baie des trépassés
(Bay of the Dead Hotel)

by Alain Greloud

Located between the Pointe du Raz and the Pointe du Van, the Bay of the Dead (Baie des Trépassés) derives its name from a misinterpretation of the Breton Boe An Aon, or bay of the river, into Boe An Anaon, bay of lost souls.

On the beach, a hotel. The Bay of the Dead Hotel, the hotel of “the bay of lost souls.” It is this name that serves as my mantra, and which, throughout this series, will be there like an inner incantation between the seclusion of the room and the harshness of the sea elements. It is the subtitle for each photograph I take. — Alain Greloud

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Située entre la pointe du Raz et celle du Van, la Baie des Trépassés tient son nom d'une déformation du breton Boe An Aon, baie du ruisseau, en Boe An Anaon, baie des âmes en peine.

Sur la plage, un hôtel. L'hôtel de la Baie des Trépassés, hôtel de “la baie des âmes en peine”. C'est ce nom qui me sert de mantra, qui tout au long de cette série, sera là comme une incantation intérieure entre l'enfermement de la chambre et la rudesse des éléments marins. Il est le sous-titre de chaque photo que je prends.

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Alain Greloud lives and works in Paris. With a degree in journalism, he now works exclusively as a freelance photographer. Greloud’s personal photographic research is influenced by travel and literature. More contemplative and narrative than informative, his photos – tinged with solitude – are often polysemous and leave much room for reflection and the imagination. If his work is sometimes marked by the notable absence of human presence, he also treats the theme of humanity more directly through portraiture, notably Man’s place in his environment and the body’s place in spaces. Alain Greloud thinks of photography as poetic introspection, a reflection on the world around us that we often do not know how to see. His work is distributed by the Plainpicture Agency. Visit his website here.