Except the clouds

The project captures the oxymoronic nature of Athens, blending its mythological heritage with its political and economic struggles.

Athens is an oxymoron. Its flamboyant mythological heritage coexists with its dark and dramatic political and economic situation. Its sun shines brightly but crushes its streets. It is a blinding light that reveals its violence and its twilight faces. And yet one feels a much more intense life force than elsewhere. The idea of resistance takes on its full meaning. The bodies rise tirelessly to become one in the face of the chaos of history. In permanent revolution.

My project is to capture this oxymoron in images, but also the complexity of the contemporary in its different temporal strata - the past, present and future at the same time, as a set of vestiges that are constantly transforming. What is left when everything collapses?

Digital manipulations, reappropriation of archives and geometric composition mingle to form a unique, hybrid image, the sum of all these different temporalities and draw a fresco of the present time. As in the streets of the city, where the ancient and the contemporary rub shoulders and become entangled. To present the immensity of a moment_ extended and spread out in very distinct dimensions, time and space.

With this sentence of Walter Benjamin always in mind, like an invisible and obsessive thread, look for the light in the ruins of Attica. "In a landscape where nothing was recognizable except the clouds, and in the middle, in a field of forces crossed by tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny and fragile human body.

This text by Benjamin, which gave the title Except the Clouds, speaks of the impossibility for a generation to find in the experience of war a moral or political reference point for facing a world in ruins. What in principle appears to be a book of photographs, becomes by its very title a profound reflection on the experience of history and the way in which young Athenians in revolt take hold of history and face societies that can no longer think of the future by learning from their past.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

In building this project I read a lot and reread Didi Huberman’s Survivorship of Fireflies. I became obsessed with this quote from Walter Benjamin. “In a landscape where nothing was recognizable except the clouds, and in the middle, in a field of forces crossed by tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny and fragile human body.” I realized that all the work I’ve done was summarized in this sentence. This opposition between the permanent and the fugitive, between chaos and fragility. I started walking the streets with this sentence in mind, chanted in a loop. An invisible thread that gave purpose to my long walks.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

I met Odysseas in the streets of Athens. He spoke French, English and Greek. For me, he represents the proud and determined youth blinded by the crisis. During the first trip I had done portraits of young Athenians, but I kept only one, that of Odysseas, so as not to lose the allegory. Odysseus is a very cultured young man. His figure allowed me to connect the past to the present. At the end of the photo session, his eyes were watering. He had asked her to look at the sun. In the photographs, he wanted us to see him fighting against the sun, against time. The portraits I made of him are like proverbs in a book, they are movements that represent a symbolic battle of the youth of the present to make sense of what they are doing. A reflection of a man's vulnerability, a reflection of someone who seems to struggle with an uncertain present.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

The serie is also a figurative narrative about timelessness and what survives the chaos of the world and confrontation. A reflection on the contemporary. The contemporary is the past, the present and the future. But also the subjective and the objective. Photography allows us to put everything in the same plane. I could say that the book 'Except the clouds' is a fresco of a vast moment.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

This work in general also reflects on historical time. I think of the very definition of the word revolution: going back in time, cycle, circular movement. I'm interested in this idea of the repetition of historical time and at the same time in the idea that there is currently a desperate period in which young people find it impossible to move forward. I come back to the sentence you said at the beginning of the interview. This book is a reflection on the experience of history and the way in which Athenians appropriate their time in the face of societies that can no longer think of their future by looking to the past.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

Athens is a city of contrasts—at all levels. Between the remains and contemporary ruins, between the stealthy, the fragile and the timeless. Between the flesh, the vegetal and the concrete. Beauty is born from the opposition of opposites, a ray of light in a squalid street, a bird perched on the common street furniture. In the same way that a spark of light is better perceived at night, beauty appears in its opposite.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

The sun is also permanent but marks the time that passes with its movement. And these stones are immutable. That’s what’s left when everything falls apart.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

'Antifascist rally at Keratsini.' archive screenshot .The erasure of values and certainties. The obscure and blurred future. The main question of this project is "What is left when everything collapses? The word "ruin" carries with it a paradox: it symbolises decline or decay and at the same time what remains, therefore resists. It is also a mental position. The expression of my melancholy. My subjectivity as an artist.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

I am not a photojournalist and it disturbs me to think of using images of human pain to promote an art project. Each of my trips to Athens was separated by a period of one year. I wanted to show images from the media that could express something of my memories. As you say, these images are also perpetual, they keep coming back in a constantly bustling anarchist neighbourhood. Security companies are present in the area and once a week they receive a series of Molotov cocktails from the demonstrators.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

I photographed objects found in abandoned building sites, vacant lots or in the streets. I decontextualised them. Each one has its own strength and takes on a new meaning. I realised that these objects were those used by the demonstrators against the police and for breaking things (nails, sticks). Everything is reused and transformed. I wanted to find the oxymoron aesthetically to reveal a certain beauty.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

I thought that what linked culture to nature were these geometries. With its strict rules, geometry seeks to determine natural laws, it seeks to create unchanging foundations for a world of changing forms. It brings us back to the notion of scale, of the small and the large, and indicates our place in the world. In Greek, geometry invites us to walk along a series of lines; it is the science through which we learn to know and modulate space. In the project, the geometries appeared somewhat randomly at the beginning. As I looked at the images, these shapes became clearer and I decided to integrate them as a formal and conceptual base, a base on which the portraits and objects remain. Following this idea of a fresco, I think this is a project that questions the contemporary, which is, as Agamben says, "a secret meeting between the archaic and the modern". Athens is emblematic for the for the extravagance of its history, but also for the disaster of its present.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project
i

Athens is a country that is said to be the "cradle of democracy" and which is becoming a symbol of the fall of a world, a kind of laboratory for everything that is happening in Europe now. When I first arrived in Athens, I had these images of the demonstrations in my head. I took screenshots of the images shown on the television news. I reappropriated them and darkened them to show their spectral and ghostly character. I felt the weight of these revolts throughout the city. But I only had a vision of these shocking and emblematic images broadcast by the media. In a way, they replace the memories. The relationship to reality becomes even more ambiguous.

© Berangere Fromont - Image from the Except the clouds photography project

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