Published in the collection Les cahiers de la maison François Méchain, Une possible traversée – paysages et autres présences au monde – by Clara Chichin brings together recent and earlier images, conceived as a poem-sequence built around forms of passage, perception, and attentiveness to presence. The book is accompanied by a short text written by Clara Chichin herself, and by a longer text, To Be From Somewhere, by Nicole Vitré-Méchain, engaging with questions of rootedness, presence, and territory. Here it is.
To Be From Somewhere…
In Clara Chichin’s photographic work there is a recurring subject: landscape, a gateway into her relationship with the world and with the visual, which she develops across a range of series, most of them arising from commissions or residencies.
Black and white, colors more or less faithful to the photographed subject, varied formats: all of these express the quality of the artist’s gaze on what surrounds her. A city dweller for many years, her attention was nonetheless already focused on a park right in the center of Montreuil: a kind of in-between, one of those spaces that escape the noise and pressure of the city, spaces suited to drawing us back into an inner world where introspection and poetry converge.
The series Aux mille sources la belle vie, carries us through a visual journey with no hierarchy of values. One might think here of Bernard Plossu’s approach. In Clara’s work, everything is worth looking at, everything is worthy of interest, provided we set aside the intellectualized relationship to the world that so often inhabits us. Seeing what is there to be seen, instead of seeing what we already believe we know or what we expect to see. A simple wonder — nothing like simplistic — that would crack open our certainties to make way for a pure presence, probably not unlike the one described by Christian Bobin.
After moving and changing regions, Clara now wanders with her camera through the landscape of the Creuse, sometimes alone, sometimes with her children, who populate the photographs with their presence. Between play and gravity, between carefreeness and awareness, they invite us into wandering as a way of taking possession of their new living space. This comes through in images that bear witness to fleeting moments, seen through the prism of an artistic eye: fragments
of play, moments a priori of no apparent interest, captures of the shiver of a puddle or the drift of a cloud… a thousand ways of becoming one with the landscape; like a cloak of nature thrown over our shoulders, an outer garment to slip on over our inner lives.
The substantifique moelle so dear to Rabelais here reveals itself as quite ordinary in its grasp of the world. And yet…
What do these images tell us, all but stolen from time as it passes? Childhood, the way of merging into a country, of experiencing its forms, its colors, its most varied materials: water, mud, plant life, sky, wind. Clara does not arrange the world to her liking: she captures it, she immerses herself in it, without a priori, gathering sensations and sensory experiences.
The artist’s experience, bound up with her own life path, brings her back to fundamentals rooted in her new environment: how does one become one with a landscape? How does one encounter it? How does one inscribe oneself within it, with no genealogy, no family roots behind her attesting to a bloodline tying her to a land that would let her authenticate the legitimacy of this self-evident claim: I am from here. How, then, does one inhabit this landscape? Looking closely at the images Clara offers us, the question comes to us, at once singular and universal: how does one come to belong to a place ? The answer, formulated through the clear-eyed gaze she brings to bear, leads us to the heart of this enigma, no doubt through the acceptance of a certain letting go, capable of revealing what so often eludes us: becoming in order to still be.
Augustin Berque, in his reflection on landscape*, placed in perspective paysage and pays sage — “landscape” and “wise land.” In her quiet yet sharp attentiveness to what surrounds her, Clara draws us into her own, in her own way, on a journey steeped in serenity and poetry, where awareness and reverie come together.
Nicole Vitré-Méchain
*Augustin Berque, les cinq raisons du paysage
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