Visit to the exhibition "Is this where we used to live?" with Anne Lise Broyer

Is This Where We Lived? is a journey through time (past and present) and memories (personal and political) around the Mediterranean. These images, imbued with softness, shadow, ink, and talc, reenact a history whose imprint is etched on the shores of this sea. This project echoes the beloved film, Méditerranée by Jean-Daniel Pollet, a true immersion in the Mediterranean roots of our civilization, while also drawing a parallel with thought as the space where the associations of poetic language are forged.

“An unknown memory stubbornly flees toward ever more distant eras.” (...) “We think we are rediscovering, hovering over in the dark, a place of the past.” (...) “Is this the way we should enter? Is this where we lived without knowing it?” (...) “If, at the same time, somewhere, someone were to quietly begin to replace you.” (...) The shores of this sea, the Mediterranean, are the stage
of a migratory tragedy, of various uprisings... This ongoing work attempts to make this Mediterranean wound visible by adopting the form of the elegy and taking as its main motif the ruin, ancient or modern, weaving together different temporalities. The ruin, this "true refuge" as Beckett mysteriously puts it, becomes a temporal marker, a solid anchor point.
In a fragile era, rife with ideological confusion, against the backdrop of the current crisis—something akin to a disaster—ruin is a freeze-frame, a dialectical image which, as Benjamin wrote, is where the Past meets the Now in a flash. A journey to the Mediterranean today is not a journey of peace. To embark on such a journey is also to grasp the magnitude of a reality. This ongoing series has already received support for documentary photography from the National Center, the French Embassy in Algeria, and the French Institutes of Beirut, Tangier, and Naples.

Anne-Lise Broyer

For over 20 years, Anne-Lise Broyer has pursued a unique photographic practice that can be summarized as an experience of literature through sight, intimately linking reading and the emergence of an image, writing and photography, as evidenced by her numerous publications shared with Pierre Michon, Bernard Noël, Colette Fellous, Yannick Haenel, Jean-Luc Nancy… She also questions the areas of friction and intersection between silver halide photography and graphite drawing directly on the print in order to reach a zone of confusion in perception. Anne-Lise Broyer thus creates visual situations that continually refer back to the photographic image and its technical history.