« Barcha » Exhibition · Musk and Amber
« Impossible to take a beautiful photo. Waste was everywhere. »
Media : Photography , Drawing
Themes : Living Matter
The first time I went to Kerkennah, as soon as I stepped off the ferry, what struck me was the piles of rubbish along the beach — blue plastic bags by the thousands scattered between the fishing boats, cans, and construction debris covering everything.
My first reaction was to change my framing, to look elsewhere for an untouched landscape, to privilege the blue sky over the heavily polluted ground.
Then I began to wonder: what do we do with this new ugliness that is spreading across Tunisia? What do we do with all these materials that, once they have settled into a landscape, can no longer simply be removed?
Microplastics and toxic materials are invading our beaches, mountains, forests, cities, fields, and seas. They are becoming part of our landscapes — and part of our bodies. We absorb them every day. Our bodies assimilate them, day after day.
I decided not to erase them — but, on the contrary, to isolate them, to extract them from the landscape and make them visible in a different way. Covering them with a field of vivid colour is the opposite of erasure: it brings them into the light.
Tri-ptyque sélectif
A panoramic view, divided into three square photographs, of a beach at the entrance to Kerkennah. Wooden fishing boats are moored along the shore, in a composition reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Boats at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.I carefully covered every piece of rubbish, one by one, with flat areas of paint — yellow in the first panel, pink in the second, and seafoam green in the third.
7achek barcha
A beach in Kerkennah, a postcard-perfect landscape, an Instagrammable image, with a house built on stilts — but within the same frame, a large black rubbish bag.
I covered the entire landscape with a field of blue, leaving only the bag and the house floating in an empty space.
A diptych: one panel for the house, one panel for the rubbish bag.
Reveal, denounce, acclimatise, transform.
Medium / Date
Altered photography, flat areas of paint — Barcha, Musk and Amber, 2016.
→ See also : Rétinades — Ecologic Cap — What If Tomorrow the Mloukhia Were to Disappear?