TALCUM

Seba Kurtis (Argentina in 1974). He studied journalism in Buenos Aires before leaving the country for Europe in the wake of the political and economic crisis of 2001. Several years spent as an illegal immigrant have informed much of his work. Now he lives and works in the UK.

This first chapter of the creative residency in Normandy took place by the sea near Cherbourg. The coast and its horizon leading to a distant fantasy abruptly contrast with the enclosed suffocating environment of the camp and its makeshift shelters. The collage process interferes with the traditional portrait of the photographic

chamber. Once again, faces are lost in the surge, on the foreground, of another translucent and brightly coloured layer: talcum ore. In accordance to the formal grammar developed by Seba Kurtis, the chosen form relates an experience: one described one morning in the newspaper under the headline "Hidden in a tank truck full of talcum". And another desperate gesture joins those already displayed by the photographer.

From this piece of news, Seba Kurtis extracts a symbolic material. The masked figures remind us of the quest, reckless and forced, for invisibility. When survival means erasing oneself, when to "be in the world" one has to become nonexistent. Here is a man disappearing behind the Talcum mineral and its market value. (Raphaelle Stopin, Director Centre photographique Haute-Normandie)