Hélène Bellenger has started a collection of cardboard packaging, using the back to print out artworks. Statuary’s luxurious and imperial aesthetics, usually associated with marble, are thus reduced to a small piece of printed package. Fragile, precious and unique, but also ephemeral and disposable, these images, whose shapes change according to the product, offer a typology of industrial forms, while also presenting selected images of the landscapes that intensive exploitation of Carrara marble has disfigured.

The theme of alteration echoes through this project, which deals both with landscapes disfigured by the intensive extraction of Carrara marble and with the creativity of the images printed on cardboard packaging. The creative process’s serial and random nature takes the image out of its traditionally square format, presenting instead truncated and altered images, with unexpected framing and sometimes damaged shapes, and colours that are subject to the variations in the cardboard and its texture

‍

His passion for meteorology began in the winter of 1963, described as historically cold. His first records were disjointed, alternating between noting temperatures, describing the sky and, occasionally, recording rainfall. Fascinated by the winters of his childhood, he observed and archived only those winters. The other seasons had little flavour, being less subject to such intense variations as the winters of yesteryear.  Ask my father, and he'll tell you how, little by little, we've moved on. How the excitement of morning frosts gave way to the anxiety of troubled cycles and the interminable wait for downpours.  As the seasons passed, the field records sent by post to Météo France ran out. All that's left are the automatic stations in the towns, which broadcast without anyone coming to check them. All eyes are glued to the screen while the clouds continue to roll across the sky. No scientist will capture the freshness of a morning flowing into the hollow of a river, or the shiver of daffodils in the woods, or the caress of the sun on the wheat ear. The murmur of the trivial has become inaudible and the clouds evaporate in silence. The drying earth, too, makes no sound. Like my father's rain gauge. Endlessly empty. Like his eyes, fading into the reflection of the weather models. Too red to let the blue of his eyes show through. Turned pink, violet, exploring that unseen spectrum. The colour of beetroot on his stained, oxidized hands, which no rain will ever wash off again.  Un point bleu pâle is an unconcealed reference to Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of planet Earth taken on 14 February 1990 by the Voyager 1 probe from a distance of over six billion kilometers. To this day, it remains the most distant photograph of the Earth. In this project, the stories intertwine. Like a need to interweave my family history, intimately linked to meteorological observation, with the history of human relationships with the Earth and changes in its climate. How these two previously unrelated stories now tell the tale of a global awakening to the urgent need to reconsider our place on Earth and in the universe.In this way, the project crosses back and forth between photographs and archives collected by my father over the course of his life (weather records, newspaper cuttings, etc.), like a poetic ode to the observation and slowness of clouds. Un point bleu pâle questions and confronts climate issues through a sensitive perspective.

‍

Il faut que les braises de Constantinople s'envolent jusqu'en Europe [The embers of Constantinople must fly all the way to Europe], Turkey , 2021 - in progress.

With the support of Cnap and the Fondation des artistes

"Il faut que les braises..." is a photography project at the intersection of documentary and fiction, about the Armenians of Turkey and the consequences of the genocide-denial discourse on the people living in Turkey today.

The project is made up of two angles: a genealogical investigation into the traces of my ancestors in Istanbul and Anatolia on the one hand, and an investigation into the Armenians of Istanbul today, made up of portraits and interviews on the other. In this way, I intend to play back and forth between the past and the present, the intimate and the documentary, past tragedies and current struggles.

In 1922, my Armenian grandfather, a teenager, immigrated to France on a Nansen passport (a stateless passport), fleeing the young Republic of Turkey where new massacres threatened the survivors of the Armenian genocide. Like many others of his generation, he passed no knowledge of his past on to his children and never spoke of what he had experienced in Turkey, in Constantinople and Talas in Anatolia. The only clue to his past is a note inserted in a novel about the genocide that he gave to his children (A dagger in this garden, Vahé Katcha), in which he reveals how his family survived.

Considering that the disappearance of family history is one of the expected effects of genocide, in the same way as the destruction of memory and culture, I decided to investigate the history of my family on the spot, and to find the traces of these people who were, for me, almost a myth. This first part of the work has been completed.

At the same time, I'm trying to understand the consequences of a policy of rewriting history, negationist and discriminatory, on Armenians in Turkey today. Deprived of freedom of expression, imprisoned or murdered when they speak out, the Armenians of Turkey are little heard and therefore often forgotten. Their history and their stories, however, represent in the extreme the experiences of minorities in Turkey today, and reflect the ambiguity of a policy that is officially assimilationist but in reality, racist. Above all, it is a particular feeling in everyday life: as the only genocide not recognized by its perpetrators to date, State denial has diffused consequences on everyday life and psychology. How does it feel to live in a country whose national hero is a criminal? When streets and schools bear the name of one of the architects of the genocide? When the President himself calls you a "remnant of the sword"?

Through the prism of my personal story, and my exploration of my family history and the territory of Istanbul, the aim is to capture something of the diffuse feeling of living in an environment where your history is denied.

‍

After her death, my mother's clothes became relics of her hollowed-out body. She imprinted her traces of wear - smells, stains, darnings, holes - marking the textiles with her vivid shapes.

"Remembering is not just an act of remembering, as we all know. It's an act of creation. It's fabulating, it's captioning, but above all it's making. (...) The English language offers a fine metaplasm in this regard, with remember, which means to remember, but which, when chanted 're-member', means to recompose, to remember." — Vinciane Desprets, Au bonheur des morts, La découverte, 2015.

In my turn, I play with her wardrobe, until now through video and photograms, slipping into her skins in every possible way so as to be in her presence.

As I strip off her clothes and manipulate them, I invent a relationship with the absent woman.

The photographic process, reduced to its 'essence': light and a photosensitive surface, allows her presence to be embodied thanks to the absence of the 'wall-bridge' that the camera can represent with reality during the shooting.  In this way, I am seeking to bring to light a form of transposition through an economy of technology: to make an imprint without a body, and to create for and through the recording device a space-time 'present' and 'animated' by the deceased.

‍