Visit the exhibition "Est-ce là que l'on habitait?" with Anne Lise Broyer

Est-ce là que l'on habitait? is a journey through time (past and present) and memories (intimate and political) around the Mediterranean. These images, made of softness, shadows, ink and talcum powder, replay a history whose imprint lies on the shores of this sea. This project echoes Jean-Daniel Pollet's beloved film Méditerranée, a veritable plunge into the Mediterranean sources of our civilization, while creating an equivalence with thought as the place where the associations of poetic language are made.

"(...) "An unknown memory stubbornly flees to increasingly distant times. (...) "You think you're back, flying over a place from the past in the dark." (...) "Is this the way to enter? Is this where we used to live, without knowing it?" (...) "If at the same time, somewhere, someone was quietly taking your place." (...) (...) The shores of this sea, the Mediterranean, are the scene
of a migratory drama, of various uprisings... This work in progress attempts to make this Mediterranean wound visible by borrowing the form of elegy and taking as its principal motif the ruin, ancient or modern, by braiding temporalities. The ruin, that "true refuge" as Beckett mysteriously puts it, becomes a temporal marker, a solid anchor
in a fragile age of ideological confusion. Against the backdrop of the current crisis, something like a disaster, the ruin is a freeze-frame, a dialectical image which, as Benjamin wrote, is where the "Then" meets the "Now" in a flash. A journey to the Mediterranean today is not a journey of peace. To embark on it is also to take the measure of a reality. This ongoing series has already received support for documentary photography from the Centre National, the French Embassy in Algeria and the French Institutes in Beirut, Tangiers and Naples.

Anne-Lise Broyer

For over 20 years, Anne-Lise Broyer has pursued a singular form of photography that can be summed up as an experience of literature through the eyes, intimately intertwining reading and the emergence of an image, writing and photography, as evidenced by the numerous editions she has shared with Pierre Michon, Bernard Noël, Colette Fellous, Yannick Haenel, Jean-Luc Nancy... She also questions the areas of friction and intersection between silver photography and graphite drawings directly on the print, in order to achieve a zone of disturbance in perception. Anne-Lise Broyer thus creates visual situations that continually refer back to the photographic image and its technical history.