Camille Hervouet
at Forillon National Park

Installation

Entre les images
(Between the Images)

Grande-Grave Heritage Site (admission fee) | Forillon National Park | Gaspé

Camille Hervouet, Nantes, France | camillehervouet.net

Based on the nature-architecture-inhabitant trilogy, the photographs of Camille Hervouet question the sensitive frictions within a region, whether that region is tangible or not.

By establishing a certain physical and mental distance, she underscores the latent tension of images, the duality between real and fantasy. She relies on a rigorous protocol related to the technique of conventional film photography, which necessitates a long and slow temporality. If she revisits historical practices of institutional or amateur photography, the point is to reveal and interpret their generic nature and understand the way in which they condition an era. In series of images whose composition reveals a singular or universal dimension of spaces and individuals, she attempts to elucidate a resistant reality. At the same time, she continues her projects with Grégory Valton on the subject of the feeling of love, in the process broadening her research towards new mediums such as video, cartography and writing.

Installation AT RENCONTRES

Entre les images
(Between the Images)

The photographs of Camille Hervouet touch on the relationship and attachment to the inhabited space. A bearer of the history of the men who’ve inhabited it, the landscape reveals the fragility and the permanence of our relationship with spaces and with the past. In the territory of Forillon National Park, which she covered during her residency in 2016, what remains of the time when men lived there, for those who look carefully, are only a few traces spread out over the landscape. There she captured the snow like a whiteness, a hole in the image, which produces an effect of the landscape being erased and disappearing, evoking a region that escapes and takes itself off in the space of just one season. Within these winter landscapes evoking a virgin space, Camille Hervouet integrates an image constructed like a reassembled story in which the connections are revealed by the white and by drawn silhouettes based on photos of Forillon’s former houses. Her photographs reflect an experience of absence, where the signs and the slight modifications of the image attest to the past presence of a home, as much as the real and symbolic emptiness left behind by the destruction, the disappearance of those homes.