Photographic exhibition
Strasbourg, September-October 2019
Apollonia dedicates an exhibition to the photographic work of Philippe Graton, carried out in the Zone à Défendre of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. These images bear witness to the alternative urban planning and architectural achievements born of this experience of alternative society, a sociological phenomenon whose interest has never been more topical.
The ZAD huts impress by the ingenuity of the men and women deployed to occupy a combat zone. The black and white prints reinforce the feeling of cathedral architecture, with windows offering openwork voids, triforiums made of wooden planks and pallets, and arches made of reclaimed sheet metal. These anarchic constructions bear witness to a passion for a cause that we think is right. Their realization, the fruit of everyone’s work, materializes the form of thought born on the ZAD and which inhabits each of these images. In his search for aesthetic beauty – the beauty of the cabins – Philippe Graton discovered a human beauty that only he could capture, photographing this universe and daily life in the heart of the ZAD from 2014 to 2019 using silver medium format. This long-term commitment gives us today an exceptional photographic work, a unique and historical restitution of this marginal experience that questions us all.
The exhibition is an extension of the experiments of the Artecitya and Vivacité projects of Apollonia. Reinventing the relationship that citizens have with their urban environment, re-enchanting the city through the involvement of artists, re-imagining human and social relationships: themes dear to the association that we wish to transmit and disseminate to as many people as possible.
- 60 silver prints made available by the Museum of Photography in Charleroi (Belgium)
- 23 large-format prints on recycled tutti frutti paper from Lana’s paper mill, by DS Impression
« Carnets de la ZAD », Filigranes Editions, 144 pages, 30 €, ISBN : 978-2-35046-482-4, published on 24 September 2019 www.filigranes.com/livre/carnets-de-la-zad/
A proposal by Georges Heintz, in partnership with the Maison Européenne de l’Architecture and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Strasbourg.
Coordination: Magali Mouthuy.
Event within the framework of the 2019 Architecture Days. With the support of the DRAC Alsace, the City of Strasbourg, the Agence du Service Civique and the Museum of Photography in Charleroi.