“Augustin Rebetez breathes energy in his works. He has developed a very ownable style over a very short period of time, even though this is not easy to put in a box. With a combination of free and staged photography using his immediate surroundings, he constantly surprises with his work. Augustin is not afraid to cross over with sculpture, film, photography and even drawings. He is one of the rare new and raw talents that the world of photography is waiting for. The fact that he studied in Vevey and lives in the region came as a pleasant surprise for the international jury. The proposed project will be a very welcome catalyst to further develop his creative madness.” excerpt from the statement of this year’s Vevey award.
Augustin’s website here and his vimeo channel here
Jacques Audiard’s “trilogy”, very worth watching: De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone), 2012, De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), 2005 and Sur mes lèvres (Read my Lips), 2001
“We have entered La ZAD (Zone A Défendre) – Europe’s largest postcapitalist protest camp – a kind of rural occupy on the eastern edge of Brittany, half and hour’s drive from the city of Nantes. Like a rebel constellation spread across 4000 acres of forest, farmland and marshes, it takes the form of old squatted farms and fields, DIY strawbale houses, upcycled sheds, theatres and bars cobbled from industrial pallets, hobbit like round houses, cute cabins built with the worlds waste, huts perched frighteningly high in trees and a multitude of other disobedient architectural fantasies. La ZAD has been a laboratory for ways of living despite capitalism since the 2009 French Climate Camp. At the camp activists and locals put together a call for people to come and live on the Zone to protect it. Now you can find illegal goat herds and organic bakeries, bike workshops and bee hives, working farms and communal kitchens, a micro brewery, a mobile library, and even a pirate radio station: Radio Klaxon. Emitting from a secret location somewhere in the Zone, the station hijacks the airwaves of “Radio Vinci Autoroute” the traffic information channel run byVinci for its private network of French motorways. The world’s largest multinational construction firm, builders of nuclear power stations, African uranium mines, oil pipelines, motorways, car parks and the infrastructure of hyper capitalism everywhere, Vinci also happen to be the company commissioned by the French government to cover this landscape in concrete and open Nantes new airport (it already has one) by 2017. Well that’s the plan. (…)
On the 16th of October 1200 riot police overran La ZAD. What had been a state free autonomous zone for 3 years was transformed within a few hours into a militarised sector. Road blocks sealed the area, Guard Mobiles (military mobile gendarme units) swarmed everywhere and bulldozers groaned across the fields. Despite resistance from the Zadists within two days the state had destroyed 9 of the 12 of the squatted spaces. On one of the days, 250 rounds of tear gas were fired into the market garden, seemingly to contaminate the vegetables that until that moment had fed over 100 Zadists every week. A principle of war is of course: cut off the supplies.(…)
Ayrault [the airport] has promoted the project as a “green” airport. It is planned to have living roofs covered in plants, the two runways have been designed to minimise taxiing to save on CO2 emissions and an organic community supported box scheme is meant to feed its employees. Next year Nantes will celebrate its latest award: European Green City 2013. To call this double speak is generous. According to a recent report a hundred million people will die of climate driven deaths over the next eighteen years. 80 percent of the slaughtered will be in countries with lower emissions. The Climate Catastrophe is no just a threat to our ecosystems and the species we share the biosphere with, it’s a violent war on the poor. A war whose weapons are built out of steel and concrete, tarmac and plastic, a war with a ticking methane bomb hiding under the artic. Waged by the logic of growth and disguised as everyday life according to capitalism, climate change is the war that could end all wars and all life with it. Calling an airport green is as cynical as calling a concentration camp humane. Perhaps in the future if we are lucky t have one, descendents will contemplate the ruins of airports as we do the sites of 18th century slave markets and wonder how a culture could have committed such barbarity so openly.(…)
Since the evictions began the art of building barricades has taken over everyday life here. Everywhere you go there are little teams busy hauling materials across fields to erect another barricade. The idea is to slow the advance of the authorities, who have named their operation “Cesar” (Caesar), perhaps a reference to Obelix and Asterix’s resistant gallic village. The police have taken the weekend off and so barricade building takes place unhindered. Now there are ones rising on the main roads as well as the green lanes. The multiplicity of different barricades reflects the different cultures at La Zad. Those living in tree houses in the Rohanne Forest have asked people not to cut living trees to make them, whilst in another part of the Zone a team of chainsaw wielding activists are tacking down oak trees and tangling steel rope in them. On one crossroads there are at least 20 barricades. There are huge hay rounds with cans of petrol beside them ready to set alight when the police attack, there is a steel wall of sitex – Anti squatting panels normally placed on doors and windows of empty houses –carefully welded together and one made from dozens of bamboo poles sticking out of the tarmace decorated with bicycle wheels. In the middle of it all there is makeshift kitchen with its mobile pizza oven made from an oil drum.
An affinity group armed with cordless angle grinders and pick axes, have been working day and night to cut out giant trenches in the roads - in some cases several metres wide and deeper than a standing adult. Ishmel tells me that yesterday road agency workers came to mend one of the smaller trenches (not surrounded by barricades). People talked to the workers, trying to persuade them to turn around and not do the dirty work of Vinci. Despite having their boss on the phone coercing them to keep going, they eventually turned around and left the hole in the road. One of the workers later said “ What troubled me most was that I’m from around here and (clearing the barricades to allow the police to circulate) feels a bit like I was helping demolish my neighbours house.”There have also been stories of local police officers that refused to join the operation.
excerpt of Laronce‘s article Rural Rebels and Useless Airports: La ZAD – Europe’s largest Postcapitalist land occupation. continue reading here
The Cassures materialize an event-image abundant in the newspapers by reapropriation through the gesture and the image. Abused and reduced to the fragility of their appearance as well as that of their medium, these images attempt to reveal spaces other than those represented, where the subject disconnects itself from its direct relationship to the news, expressing as such a distance between the event and its representation.
« Pauline Fouché works with the relationship we might have to the news images (and particularly those of war and human drama) through the gesture-motif of the Cassures. Through the photographic reproduction of a crumpled up newspaper, an image that cannot be taken by its backside, beyond representation is produced. It is simultaneously a crevice and an invagination. We can almost hear the sound of a clash where time-lines are anarchically broken : tragedy of an event, factuality of media treatment, concussion of the glance. »
“Violent clashes between youths and riot police in the northern French city of Amiens have left 16 officers injured and several public buildings torched in some of the worst rioting in the area for years – reopening the fraught political debate about France’s troubled housing estates.
Rioting broke out on deprived estates in the north of the city at 9pm on Monday and raged until 4am. Around 100 youths set fire to cars, a nursery school and a youth centre as well as firing buckshot and projectiles at police officers, who saturated the streets with teargas as reinforcements arrived from neighbouring areas.
“The confrontations were very, very violent,” the mayor of Amiens, Gilles Dumailly, told French television network BFM, describing “a scene of devastation”.
There had been unrest among youths on housing estates in Amiens-Nord earlier this month and again on Sunday night, apparently sparked by tensions over spot checks by police on residents.
French media reported that violence broke out between local residents and the police following a check on a driver said to be driving dangerously, near to the spot where the family and friends of a 20-year-old who died in a motorbike crash on Thursday had gathered for a memorial ceremony.”
Les pétales des fleurs de grenouilles, “AnUra-Flora“,
se développent dans un tout premier temps
à partir des tissus pulmonaires du batracien (fig.1.).
L’amorce de la mutation utilise
les traces génétiques fantômes
des branchies du stade larvaire (têtards).
Le pétale se constitue ensuite
exclusivement sur une base
de tissu épithélial humide (muqueuse) respiratoire.
L’étalement des tissus s’accompagne,
progressivement et en s’amplifiant,
d’une hybridation du tramage cellulaire
VÉGÉTALE & ANIMALE.
Même une fois aboutie, l‘AnUra-Flora
gardera toujours
cette singularité cellulaire hybride.
La fleur se déploie tout autour d’un cœur ;
celle-ci n’a pas de tige.
I met Wladd’s work about 4 or 5 years ago when it was a hybrid of photography, design and digital technology. He now seams to be working in his own unique realm of arguments given the ideology and research behind his works.
“Ménager les site frappés de croyance comme indispensable territoire d’errement de l’esprit. Gilles Clément Manifeste du tiers paysage
Cela aurait pu être une belle histoire, un doux romantisme entre l’homme et la nature. Mais il n’en est rien. Je trafique, reconstruis et extrais. Je recherche des formes à construire ou à mettre en lumière. La nature a toujours été mon terrain de jeu; je la transforme.
Michel Foucault disait à propos des hétérotopies qu’ils sont des lieux précis, que l’on peut définir sur une carte, mais investis par des mondes utopiques. Un théâtre ou un musée, par exemple, sont des hétérotopies, définissables géographiquement mais investis par des mondes imaginaires; des mondes dans un monde. La nature a, pour moi, aussi cette faculté. C’est un lieu magique, un lieu imaginaire.
Mon travail est fortement lié à cet imaginaire, qui est vu au travers d’un prisme intermédiaire, celui d’un appareil photographique. Composée de deux séries (Les cadavres exquis et Paysages), In(ter)vention est une recherche de formes et de textures, où la nature est détournée au profit d’une interprétation personnelle de ses éléments constitutifs.
D’un côté, c’est une nature décontextualisée et arrangée par mes soins; des compositions traitées en studio. De l’autre, c’est le studio qui s’invite dans la nature et dévoile par la lumière des formes et des ambiances. Dans les deux cas, il y a de cette inquiétante étrangeté. La présence de la mort dans Les cadavres exquis ou l’ambiance nocturne des Paysages confère à cette série une dimension surréaliste.
Mon univers est la nuit, le monde des rêves, celui des chimères qui sortent de leur caverne. Des bruits nous guettent, ils nous survolent, nous effleurent. Un craquement à droite, puis des ailes se déploient, elles ululent, tourbillon: silence. Le vent soulève les feuilles. Il caresse nos cheveux et chante entre les pieds de géants feuillus. Un éclair! L’appareil à tout vu. Pour moi, encore une fois, c’est une figure étrange qui s’est dessinée dans l’ombre des branches. Une interprétation innocente, mue par la curiosité: une aventure.
C’est à cette étrangeté nocturne et sylvestre que je veux convier le spectateur.”
@ Julie Rebouillat,No Border Calais, manif, 27 June 2009
Refugees in Calais find shelter where they can, in spaces left abandoned or neglected by French citizens. Some sleep in the park or under the canal bridges. Most live in one of two kinds of dwellings: (a) squats in deserted buildings, of which there are many in the post-industrial landscape of the town; and (b) the ‘jungles’ or camps made up of tents and makeshift shelters on disused sites and wasteland, usually around the outskirts of the town.
These settlements are not just shelters, but homes. Here people sleep; eat; sit and drink coffee around the fire; play cards; read and study; listen to and play music; dance; wash their clothes; welcome newcomers and visitors; and share food, water, tobacco, conversation, and each others’ company. But this life is under constant threat. Police raid the squats and jungles every day and night. A particular settlement may be left alone for two or three days, but never for long. Or it may be targeted with repeated visits, and attacked multiple times in one night.
These raids raise a number of questions as to their legality. Under French law, the police normally require permission from the owner and/or occupants in order to enter a property, or, failing this, a warrant from the court. CMS activists have witnessed and documented quite literally hundreds of police raids in Calais. We believe that the vast majority of these may have been carried out without authority.
Besides arresting people, when police officers raid they frequently slash or flatten tents; smash windows; throw away or contaminate water; spray bedding with CS gas; and generally destroy or take peoples’ personal belongings. This is an everyday reality. During bigger raids, council workers accompany the police to demolish buildings; confiscate tents and belongings in trucks; and/or spray disinfectant and other chemicals, on possessions, including on bedding.
In particularly nasty incidents, activists have returned to Africa House following major raids to find that bedding had been damaged and urinated on, and that walls had been daubed with what appears to be Neo-Nazi graffiti. We have also witnessed damage to Muslim prayer spaces and the desecration of holy books, including a Tigrinyan Bible, and the Koran.
Along with beatings, arrests and identity checks in the street, these raids contribute to a constant state of fear for refugees in Calais. This in itself has obvious effects on peoples’ mental health and well-being. Yet raids further undermine bodily and mental health by making it impossible to create stable and hygienic living conditions. For example, since cooking utensils as well as food supplies are regularly stolen or destroyed, it becomes near impossible for migrants to feed themselves adequately.
Finally, to add to the pressure, police employ what can only be described as tactics of psychological warfare, such as repeated nightime visits with sirens, bright torches and loud music.
Full document compiled by Calais Migrant Solidarity of the No Borders network, documenting police violence from June 2009 to June 2011 can be found here
