Set design: Serge Perret.
Images:
Estelle Bouchet, Matéo Brocard, Marie Brocher, Manon Buhagar, Asia Calabrò, Lucien Crausaz, Indra Crittin, Sasha Divià, Théo Dufloo, Marvin Estevez-Locatelli, Max Gigon Adatte,Lucien Giorgis, Laura Grand, Maude Gyger, Laurent Isler,
Théophile Maeder, Aude Mayer, Yohan Nieto, Tessa Racioppi, Nine Sager, Miriam Theus, Romain Violier
et Lorraine Vurlod
© Laurent Isler, Infrastructures, 2022-2023
In addition, a book titled Hors-scène brings together approximately 7,000 photographs created as part of collaborations with theaters, along with an essay
by Éric Vautrin, playwright.
Artistic direction: Virginie Otth and Alexandra Ruiz.
Graphic design: Alexandra Ruiz.
This exhibition explores the fictional aspects of photography and its relationship to the performing arts, particularly theater. The staged image plays with the ambiguity between the realism of photography and its ability to stimulate the imagination. Through its theatricality, it produces a more or less spectacular effect on the audience, who hesitates in its interpretation between reality and artifice, resemblance and invention. Staged photography, like theater, places particular importance on the viewer's perspective and the active process of reception.
Light is a meaningful element that contributes to both the construction of the photographic image and the theatrical performance. In this exhibition, lighting is materialized not only through the use of theater spotlights and filters on the glass panes but also in the hue of the walls. Thanks to the scenography, the audience becomes aware of the various ways of perceiving space and images. The different filters offer a visual journey between transparency and opacity, sharpness and blur, the visible and the invisible. The white walls evoke the famous white cube commonly found in contemporary art exhibition spaces, as opposed to the dark room of cinemas and theaters, often referred to as a black box. This latter space evokes the camera obscura, which was used in antiquity to observe eclipses and is considered the precursor to the photographic camera.
Why should we oppose black to white, reality to fiction? The gray walls are there to remind us that nothing can be reduced to a simple binary schema. The ambient lighting in the exhibition creates multiple shades of gray, suggesting the full richness of staged photography, beyond the duality between shadow and light. Like a double-faced mirror, the performed image questions our perceptions and mental representations; it offers us an opening onto possible worlds.
Nassim Daghighian