Demande à la poussière, L’empreinte du ciel

(Ask the Dust, The Trace of Sky)

2017



Demande à la poussière,
Edition Départ pour l’Image

created on the occasion of the solo show at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris,
January 17- February 16, 2020.

40 pages
Format 165 x 235 mm
Paper: Favini Crush Almond and Fedrigoni Freelife Vellum
Author: Manon Lanjouère
Publisher: Dèpart Pour l'Image / MEP
January 2020
ISBN 978 88 944622 4 1
100 copies

reedition of 100 copies in november 2021

Ask the Dust makes one step closer to the minute, counts the speck of dust that the oblivion has not taken, explores the thin fissures where the ephemeral trace of a past life has found refuge. Following the exemple of John Adams in I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, this act recounts a storm, a fictionnal catastrophe symbolizing the emotional shock of the protagonists.  The storm, considered to a love story, turns upside down their worlds, crumble the reality and redefines a new way of life. The journey is following the struggle against the devastation and the transformation of the inner life. Alone in his room, the Man resides between a state of arousal and dream. He stares at the ceilling, the roof is collapsing under the weight of the thunder, he's facing the sky. This catastrophe from which we will only keep the signification without evoque any reason or content, is at the core of my approach by extending it to the use of the medium. The dust related to the analog practice representing, that which is infinitely large as well as the others alterations, that become a full-fledged subject. Through this « ballad between the infinitely large and the infinitely small » (Sophie Ristelhueber) I am writting the resurgence of an impression, the rise of a memory generated by the encounter of familiar places, the remembrance through an object and the spirituality that a landscape reveals in us. We are entering in an other space, where the body is absent, a space that doesn't know his own limit and disapear in fragments of memories which are recomposing.
Leave it to the wind to decide what traces are left behind in the dust.