Marie-Hélène Le Ny

The Crossing of appearences
1997/2000

 photographist






 
      The city is not really an entity, rather a juxtaposition and a stratification of different and sometimes contradictory elements. Our perception of the urban space is eminently cultural and dependent on tools which allow us to understand the world (master - or not, of the language, the family and social story, the education, the faiths, the mobility, the age, the sex).
Etienne Jules Marais and Edweard Muybridge tried to decompose the movement, to uncover the secrets of the human and animal locomotion, in images where the aesthetic dimension sometimes takes it on the documentary aspect and the scientific interest. Duchamp was inspired by it in its nude descending a staircase, and there are many artists who made the bards of the speed which symbolized the modern life at the beginning of the last century.
For my part, I tried to recompose the perpetual motion which shakes the city by stacking consecutive temporal elements, playing the transparency of the film which allows this " crossing of appearances ". I redistribute in my way the space to those who crossed it, crumpling up trajectories, forcing the meetings and making strata so thin and permeable the some in others than the immovable space and the built take care of a density and a presence contrasting with the translucent aspect which characterizes the passage of beings in movement. Atget made so that they disappear for the benefit of the durability of the city, I convene them on the contrary to slow down the faint of the life in the space and the time which still escape and always the control.
I do not wish that their forms dissolve, but that they register an immanent lightness which opposes to the weight of bodies. In the received image, at the same time fixed and unstable, the glance floats as in a dream, a mental image, everything seeming to him(her) at once so familiar and nevertheless so different... How in a movie where would lengthen on the retina the obstinacy of the images, recovering the some the others, without masking !