Artist
Marie Hervé
Marie Hervé (b. 1996) is a visual artist and author, currently living between Turin and Marseille. Evolving between Southern France, Italy, Greece, the Maghreb and the Middle East, her work explores Mediterranean landscapes through notions of memory and ruin, the politics of conservation, and historical constructions. The use of the document, the limits of truth and falsity in photography, and the relationship with our personal archives are recurrent motifs in her work – from archaeological museum collections to images compulsively recorded on mobile phones. A co-founder of the collective and publishing house MYTO, Hervé’s work has been exhibited in a series of exhibitions throughout France.
Instagram: marieanneherve
Website: marie-herve.com
The island on the island
It all started with a cupboard. At first sight the cupboard is nothing special, but it’s played a fundamental role in the research I’ve been conducting for several years. It’s found in my grandparent’s house in the south of France. It contains everything a photographer with archival tendencies could dream of: heaps of images without dates, names or geographical indications. I knew they were family photos, and photos that my grandfather – a sailor – took during his trips in the Mediterranean. In these images, I was struck by a frightening, omnipresent character: the water. The whiteness of the limestone cliffs above, the tiny figures on unknown beaches, my grandmother's body submerged in Corsican rivers, and dazzling reflections on the sea during the hot summers in Marseille. Waves – whole sequences of waves in black and white, surely taken from the deck of the boat. But where? At the centre of the sea. Nowhere. Everywhere.
The territory of the Mediterranean, whose tales I’ve heard since I was born, became an obscure myth engulfed by these waters; a mysterious space that I’m told was the foundation of Western civilization. This sea – these places – should be the foundation of a common identity of which mine is part.
But what do we really mean when we talk about the Mediterranean? I went there myself, to try to see with my own eyes those places that the archives first showed me. I did not, though, find the places where these images were made, nor did I discover the ‘truth’ of this territory. I worked instead as a kind of melancholic archaeologist, reporting on what’s absent, phantasmagorical, and what’s completely invented in memories.
In Monika Orpik's work titled Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road, we are invited to engage with migration and transience with her stark black-and-white photographs that document various states of impermanence along the Polish-Belarus border. The Białowieża National Forest is the center of Orpik’s meditation on life at a time of political oppression and transformation.
Peter Pflügler’s work Now is not the right time equally begins with a forest and a deep desire to use photography as a means to investigate and render previously hidden secrets visible. Strikingly coherent and honest in his approach, Pflügler’s work intimately instigates a conversation about suicide, secrecy, and the suddenness of time’s ongoing passing.
Raisan Hameed focuses on the materiality of images in his work, Zer-Störung which, as the name suggests, looks at the processes of destruction, and what remains are documents formed by various layers of time as open questions and scars. Starting with the combination of personal and archival imagery from his hometown Mosul, Hammed’s work engages with the photograph’s power to obscure time and meaning.
Bärbel Reinhardt’s work draws from photographic stratification. Working across various modes of presentation, Reinhardt’s work plays with the imaginary quality of the photograph, looking at the contemporary cut-and-paste visual queues as signposts for a recyclable iconography. In her project, again still erratics perhaps, the artist gathers, deconstructs, cuts, assembles, photographs, re-photographs, and repurposes these to create a dense visual space where different times and techniques collaborate.
In artist and author Marie Hervé’s work, history is both completed and open-ended – her tendency to work with a combination of archival and personal imagery anchors her narratives into past, present, and future. Her project The island on the island is a meditation on the Mediterranean territory’s beauty and transience. The act of researching and retracing the past, becomes a means through which to engage with the unstable nature of the present.