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| Les Situations. photographie couleur. Valérie Jouve, 1999 |
'(...) Jouve focuses on the many different countenances presented by walls seen as materials. Collapsed stone walls, exposed rebars, and the still bright-coloured wallpaper of a room where somebody once lived convey both the passage of time and the remnants of human involvement. By overlapping these fragmentary images, the artist brings into relief the environments of people who see or walk past these walls every day.
Rather than the dazzling and glitzy aspects of the city, Jouve picks out people and townscapes that display a certain pathos, and by doing so, encourages viewers to contemplate the relationship between people and the urban space.'
I became familiar with Jouve's photographic works while visiting the Marcel Duchamp Prize retrospective in Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Her works are dealing with walls as anthropologic aspects of life where we can see people's identities being reflected upon them.
image source: les inattendus.eu
