L’Institute for Photography presents outside the walls at Hospice Comtesse Museum the exhibition of Jean-Michel André, Room 207.
A photographic project in the vein of autofiction, Room 207 is based on the reconstitution of memories lost following childhood trauma.
On August 5, 1983, while making a night stopover with his family on the road to vacation, Jean-Michel André's father was murdered with six other people in a hotel in Avignon. The case has never been fully elucidated, but the investigation nevertheless revealed a motive: an attempted hold-up carried out by “small-scale” criminals which degenerated into carnage. However, the circumstances of the massacre remained unclear.
Aged 7 and present in a room adjoining his father's at the time of the events, Jean-Michel André, in shock, lost his memory.
Forty years later, he revisits and photographs places that he could have – or could have – crossed with his father. He combines investigative elements, press archives and family objects with his photographs to compose a collection questioning memory, mourning and reparation.
How can we make abstract notions tangible and share the intimate to touch on a form of universal?
Jean-Michel André's approach goes against pathos and the spectacular and questions the limits of the image: what can we show, how, why, for whom? The photographic medium is transformed into a restorative instrument, the work takes shape and becomes the sole driving force.
The exhibition, conceived as a visual essay, is as much a reconstitution as a reconstruction. Through her poetry, she transports us into an anachronistic temporality, mixing the future and the past of that night of August 5, 1983, and shows us a quest for truth which, little by little, transforms into deliverance.
Chambre 207 is also a book of photographs to be published by Éditions Actes Sud in early October 2024.
Commissariat : Anne Lacoste
Exhibition co-produced by the Institute for Photography with the Musée de l'Hospice Comtesse de Lille and the Center Méditerranéen de la Photographie in Bastia where it will be presented in the fall of 2025. Project carried out with the support of documentary photography from National Center for Visual Arts, of the Hauts-de-France Region and the Mediterranean Center of Photography, Bastia.
Jean-Michel André: Room 207
Until February 2, 2025
Hospice Comtesse Museum
32 rue de la Monnaie
59800 Lille, France
www.institut-photo.com
