VALÉRIE
LERAY
EXOTICISM AT HOME
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The production of wallpaper developped mainly in England, France, Germany in the middle of the XVIII. Between 1790 and 1863, Landscapes – people spoke at the time of “panoramic” wallpapers – formed a significant share of the market. The taste for “ philosophic ” travel and the romantic curiosity of nature explained the success of these very big pictures : it was a way to practice exoticism at home. Later other tastes and the competition of photography explained the decline of theses productions.
The "philosophic " journey and the "romantic" journey are motivated by the desire to find in the raw nature and in societies profoundly different from our society the first truth of the Humans of their relations with nature and the organization of their social life.
In an empty space of a former orphanage, which after the WWII became an apartment building, I am using a form of wallpaper in relation to a subject of journey, a leitmotiv of the exhibition as well as the one of my main topic of my own artistic interest. It is concentrated on a term of geopoetic and became the motor for making a panoramic wallpaper. In geopoetic, the transdisciplinary dimension of the research and the predominance of some principles such as nomadism and radical critics relate to the concerns regarding travel writing, situated somewhere between literature and geography. The geopoetic approach opens reflection on a poetic pole, which means the intrinsic link between the travel and the “writing” of the journey, as the reading pole, that needs to consider the reader’s subjectivity and his/her own connection to the world.
In the image itself, which was taken in Sapmi Region, in the Northern part of Sweden, inhabited by the indigenous nation of Sami, I try to relate to this concept. The black & white photography becomes a counterpoint for a concept o journey, understood in our consume culture as searching for neo-exotic images, getting to the true places, uncivilized and untouched by our own culture.
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ADDITIONAL TEXT
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PROJECT ROAD MAP
. Photography Installation, 24h brl/gda curated by Paulina Olszweska,
Dom Chodowieckiego i Grassa and Krupa Gallery, Gdansk, Poland, 2018
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