www.youtube.com/@francoisbancon2496

some short video introducing some of my series

Nature in Exile_I will plant TREES series

I will plant TREES_specimen_discovery, 250x158cm

I will plant TREES_roses and leaves decay, 296x65cm

I will plant TREES_as it used to be, 250x180cm

I will plant TREES_leaves on tiles_audience, 250x180cm

Nature in exile

I love these quiet moments at the corner café, a teh Tarik on the Formica table... the ceiling fan spitting out puffs of air... warm despite its creaking efforts... nothing seems to be in a hurry. Even the ballet of the waiters seems to slow down, the tropical plants suffocate in their concrete tubs, the birds, so playful as usual, have taken refuge in the silence and shade of the trees... the impression of living at the pace of nature, certainly, but urban and cramped. Eros and Thanatos mixed together, the laws of nature are certainly unjust and unequal, written to survive but not to dominate. We’ve imitated the worst of it, and it’s deep down inside us. We have long believed ourselves to be above this rebellious nature. Overlooking it, dominating it. We’ve potted her up and put her in a zoo, a circus like a muse- um that reassures us that we’re not so bad. But nature resists, bursting in where we least expect it, resisting with despair, fighting without limit against the concrete that oppresses it, creating an aesthetic of despair and suffering. Emergences of life that become sacred. These thin, perennial streams speak of a present that sounds the death knell of a not-so-distant harmonious past. We exist, these apparitions tell us, even in the exodus to unwelcoming lands where we’ll have to resist and survive.

Nature, an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge. Knowledge of how to live, how to resist, how to die and how to be reborn.
Caged here, these fragile elements of nature deserve these bright, acid colors, even if artificial. Nature that we have so much fragmented and even humiliated. These cages and these colors are like respect for its irreducible beauty, its indomitable pride and, hopefully, its invincibility. The greedy, arrogant human being should take inspiration from natural predators who respect their preys, knowing that their disappearance would condemn them to extinction. And we end up being amazed that there’s still a moon shining brightly at night, stubbornly circling around us - a moon that has no life of its own and surely regrets it to the point of keeping a close eye on the wanderings, gestic- ulations and whims of these spoiled earthlings. it also reminds us that the immensity of the cosmos is far “beyond human”.

 

12 roses on coloured tiles, 250x100cm

17 leaves, 175x215cm

when they no longer have a name, nature in exile_#3, 150x150cm

when they no longer have a name, nature in exile_#5, 150x150cm

departure_C, nature in exile_#5, 200x200cm

departure_G, nature in exile_#5, 200x200cm

Nature in exile_All is fine.

It’s in photography’s DNA to glorify neither surface nor volume. Its irremediable 2-dimensional nature makes it dependent on the subjects photographed, with no escape from either matter or relief. And then there’s the frame, always a bit of an intruder, giving the printed image a thickness that can’t be taken for granted.

- The frame is a surface that sometimes dilutes, other times magnifies what it surrounds, from which it can no longer be distinguished. Frames, grids, squares... lists and enumerations... more questions than answers. Images in photography are above all silences, as if in struggle with the subject’s chatter.
- In bathrooms and laboratories, wherever cleanliness is essential, we find these inexpressive, neutral tiles, barely present, which strangely, maliciously provide the image, when confronted with them, with a kind of dignity that makes some escape from their sober neutrality for some and from their arrogant extraversion for other. So far from the surface, even further in time.

- Images, like a stroll, a little lost in the surface that seems to welcome them. Images, colors, frames, a celebration of the insignificant, the overlooked, the glimpse here or there that we’ve taken the time to jot down in a little mechanical moleskin notebook. To remember the mood of the moment.
- Uncertain memory, these pieces of time that have no other link than to have become images, witnesses of a passage, objects of a blurred reverie... perhaps simply a poetry of the uncertain, the vague, the un- deserving and that never tires of any slowness. No fantasies, little ego... photographing, transporting a cumbersome “me” that distorts everything.

- Uncertain memory, fleeing the grandiose and spectacular, taking notes and not really knowing what to do with them, like unanswered questions to be put aside for better days. And from far, far away, nature intrudes, inviting itself, everywhere in exile, but resisting as if in search of home.

nature in exile_post it suite, 200x200cm

The voices of the displaced_territories_fraction_6a-b-c, each 130x90cm

The voices of the displaced_territories_fraction_11a-b-c, each 130x90cm

 

 where we’re from...Indistinct shapes and shapeless masses at first as if waking up, colored by a mixture of hope and regrets as the day becomes clearer, then fragmented, divided, unstable but finally readable.

Displaced... memory territory 

It happens that the memory is in pieces. So far away, after such long wanderings, trials, doubts and pain. The memory of places, places of « before ». The migrant exists from before the trauma of exile, rupture and oblivion. Memories forgotten, dreaded and desired as a condition of marching forward. Memory filters the territory of origins, deforms it, idealises it or curses it. All that remains for the migrant is often the effort of memory for feeling human. As if grasping on to faded memories, the image appears like indistinct forms and formless masses at first as one awakens, coloured by a mixture of hope and regrets as the day becomes clearer, fragmented, divided, unstable but finally readable when the body is functioning at its full. An image like a mirage, and which relieves, which reassures not to be real, to be only an image without future. Territories, Others, « similars » condemned to be only images. The reality of the migrant, like his body, is forever fragmented by the fear of forgetting, by the hope of a return. The memories of the migrant are not souvenirs, they are solely the condition of being and of existing, they alone make it possible to blur, to soften the fracture of displacement. Displacement, here, is not a movement, it is not “going forward”, does not open onto any exotic encounters, it is a wound, at best like a scar.

the voices of the displaced_fragmented bodies

 

the Voices of displaced_EXODUS, each 200x200cm

 

 

the voices of the displaced_fiction, each 130x90cm

the voices of the DISPLACED, each 187x86cm

 Displaced... the fragmented souls, Introduction.

This work is a series of impressions, fleeting and sometimes oppressive… Displaced persons or migrants carry within them, whatever their age, a weight of memories, of losses and regrets, of hope too. There is the effort to keep alive where we come from as if to confirm who we are. There are the territories, these objects (the territories) become sacred with uncertain contours and which are the subject of a constant work of memory. Nothing picturesque, green and wet grass, dilapidated walls, a cluttered and sad beach, everyday life that only moves them, who are deprived of it. The displaced, generic actors in this work, cling to these memories as their reason for being, for forgetting is like disappearing. Then there are bodies whose suffering we know, fragmented as they are, as if trapped in a mistreated identity by a world they feel hostile and which only provides them with obscurity. Bodies that, like territories, must be constantly remembered. The displaced are in an intimate struggle so that nothing is erased.

This memory at work is the only subject of this series.

A Long After [TIME] serie

A LONG AFTER_TIME 

A work on time? Like wondering what effect time has on us, by the “we” I mean the artists, creators, image makers in the broad sense. Time affects us, it is undeniable and irreversible, but that does not meet the challenge of making images from it. So I looked for points of view, “topics” where obviously time was at work. Either the images thus constructed, by their atmospheres, by the elements which compose them, by certain effects of color and depth, by their symbolism, revealed a “time” at work, or because the subjects themselves were like victims, which have become signs of a time that has passed, either, and it is not very different, because the fragile and ephemeral beauty of the subjects made them more susceptible, even more vulnerable to the tests of time, or finally because the time, which is neither speed nor duration, was just the space of unforeseen encounters. Time, this variable of physics which has neither speed, nor space nor does not require a particular environment to exist does not stop talking to us about the past and the future but forces us to “today” . Time is a mystery that cannot be named or figured, but “controls” us everywhere and always. Without time we would have a hard time having any consciousness or even just existing. Time, because we neither know how to name it nor decipher it, could well be everywhere in the image, whatever the image and without the image knowing it. The image as an idea of ​​space-time. This time which forever prevents the past from being altered, which condemns us to the moment already past, and only sparingly delivers clues to the future, gives the impression of knowing about us what we don’t. Given by physics or the fruit of consciousness, time is mysterious. However, things and events happen in time as if we were really only one of the objects of time.

Time is benevolent like those great cathedrals with invisible transcendences which welcome us and frighten us.

anonymous_attitudes_serie. each 150x150cm

 I smiled a little here at these prefabricated stories, these facial expressions and postures borrowed from magazines ... but with a certain tenderness for these heroes of a day crossed here and there at random in parks, cafes and streets. They are everywhere, sometime dressed as for a party, often accompanied by a camera accomplice charged with immortalising the moment. I just slipped into the scene for a few seconds, stealthily, slyly, to steal a bit of a moment that wasn't meant for me.

These images, more than others, exist only through the targets of future “voyeurs”. They are images to "appear" ... what we are not, what we are not enough.?. There is, here, only the subject and its face to face with the idea of itself.

It's all about waiting, nothing more ... being what you think you can be. The distance that is created between the subject and the image is also an enigma. Contrary to these smooth and magnificent shots of stereotypes, of these “too much” images, I wanted to muddy the waters a bit, to detach myself from the inescapable horizon that will make all of these images end up drowned in the immense loneliness of social networks.

Anonymous, necessarily anonymous ... There lies the “truth” of this series. Photography can no longer be “what was there”. I needed a certain fixity, like that of the silent icons. I also had to isolate them as in a sacred space that says nothing about them.  They are no longer characters, just attitudes, just simulacra. Simply put the images back in their world of images.

I had to dig deeper into myself to find the evidence of the photograph. Roland Barthes, “Camera Lucida”. 1980. Le Seuil edition.

The birth of the reader must be paid for by the death of the author. Roland. Barthes (in the death of the author / Le bruissement de la langue, Le Seuil edition. 1984).