Anne-Marie Filaire I have been photographing landscapes for the last 23 years. It is through this subject that I express myself. I am interested in the notion of temporality in the representation of the landscape. I explore psychique temporalities between chronicity and history, and cultural temporalities through the Orient ( Islam in Yémen), and the West through my own culture. This research on the perception of time through its representation in the landscape, lead me to the elaboration of a work on traumatised spaces and on countries involved in a peace process. These scenes constitute geographic spaces which are, for me, the field of my experimentation and of my reflection. I have been working in what are known as border zones in the Middle East and in South Asia, East Africa and in Europe . I am writing about a border whose opacity shatters the regard. I am here talking about images, images that I have been taking here, in this place, for over the past few years. Today I question this work, at this moment when the separation is a “fait accompli”, where access into the Territories is becoming more and more difficult. I am thinking of Gaza , inaccessible, and of the feeling of emptiness these images inflict. Today the image is controlled / under control. In the Occident /West, after having been overdosed with a flood of continual and orchestrated images, we no longer receive any.( images from Gaza , from the Territories). The first time I came to Jerusalem was in July 1999. It was here that I wanted to begin my Middle East research, in this place where time and space meet. I wanted to learn about the city, independently of any faith or belief in any written text, but as the visual perception of a unique urban order, attempting to feel rather than describe where I was. At that time I had been invited by the ex director of the Museum of Israel within the framework of a residency, in order to realise a photographic work on Jerusalem . At this time I was also committed to a mission for the Ministry of Environment in France , a Photographic Observatory of the Landscape, which aimed at recording the evolution of landscapes over time and of constituting a fund of archives on national territory. Impregnated by this approach and by constantly moving in and around Jerusalem , I was able to read, within the landscape, the first signs of the occupation around the city. It was a little more than one year before the beginning of the second Intifada. And then, I moved away from Jerusalem . I needed to see it from a distance, to turn myself away from it/ to detach/ remove myself from it. I rented a car and went to Jericho , then Gaza where I stayed alone for three days. From this period, in my photography, the traces mark this distance, this frontier, this period in between possibilities. Gaza was the strongest image, the most frightening, the one that today remains for me the most inaccessible, the most absent and the one which shatters the perception of space and time. I came back twice in 2004, in March and April and then October, and stayed in total for three and a half months. During this time, in March 2004, I was presenting an exhibition titled “Deserted spaces”at the Al-Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem , an exhibition I presented a few weeks later at the Ein-Harod Museum in Israel . Images of the Eritrean-Ethiopian frontier and of the synagogue in Asmara , a desert, a open and empty space, and a synagogue, an intimate space but just as empty, because Asmara is a city emptied of its Jewish community. This metaphore of the frontier in the exhibition allowed me to enter into a story and to confront experiences, places and people. 2004, the year which witnessed the end of Yasser Arafat’s reign and the construction of the wall, corresponds to an extremely tense period. Contact between populations ceased and I found myself confronted with continual rupture within the landscape. The confinement was materialising in front of my eyes. I worked in movement between people and places, passing from one world to another, I was not trying to represent this confinment, but rather to work within it. Around this time I had begun to record land around Jerusalem everytime I passed through. It was in this movement that my work was installed. The Exhibition’s passage from Jerusalem to Ein-Harod corresponds to the day after the assasination of Cheikh Ahmed Yassine, the Hamas spiritual leader, in Gaza . This passage for me was violent, emotionally trying, I had the feeling that I would get to one place and lose the other, and had the sensation of not being able to connect thought with (a) movement. In october 2004 I returned to continue this ground work, and I continued to photograph these places I was moving through, where I was circulating. I photographed as to verify, to conserve time. I photographed the same places in order to record their movements and their transformations, to find my marks. I installed myself within the time. Producing representations of these landscapes allows their memory to be conserved, in a way allowing them to be thought. Since then, I returned regularly to continue this recording of time and space around these frontier zones. I have also worked in places, such as, for example Nablus after the last elections which brought Hamas to power, or in Tel Aviv last January. I also worked in South Lebanon in September 2006. Today the separation is a “fait accompli”. I feel that Jerusalem has lost its flavour and that things have escaped/ slipped away. I question myself about the continuation of this work. What does it mean ? I felt that the most important thing was to bring the work back here, to give back the images, the landscapes. If the time of the work, its duration, is considered as the elaboration of an emotional structure, it’s also the documentary base of its form that allows the space to remain open. In Occidental societies, landscapes exist through the representation we have of them, in paintings, then in photography. These landscapes exist thanks to the images. As a photographer, it seemed important to me, essential, to produce images of Palestine ’s landscapes. In my photography, the landscape is not a continuation but rather an accumulation. An accumulation of time, of moments. I work at the frontier. The frontier here is something very violent which is being materialised by a wall. The space closes in on itself, and paradoxically, by my turning around myself as I photograph, this space opens up, it unfolds within the image. My images are large bandages ( headbands) , sequences, fictional landscapes which become opaque bands and whose density alters our perception. The violence done to the landscape alters our vision, perturbs the psychique continuation of a containing space. The form of the work, paradoxically, becomes a containing envelope, a will to continue although faced with the impossibility of being able to think the Other. The documentary aspect questions what these anxieties inflict on our regard and stands as witness to the evolution of these frontier zones, of this confinement. Anne-Marie Filaire Paris , 8 mai 2007 |