© Topotrope

© Topotrope

© Topotrope

Topotrope

Julio Bescós (born in Huesca, Spain, 1970) and Alexandra Caunes (born in Lyon, France, 1978) unite their artistic skills from 2008 under the name Topotrope. They live and work in Saint-Etienne, France. Together, they conduct a visual research on the different uses of photography and approach the genre of the landscape, in this relationship between a space and the one who looks at it. They circumscribe their areas of investigation, often peripheral to large urban centers, but which are close enough to make us feel its behavioral and visual influence. By deconstructing the photographs they capture, by tinkering with them, they organize their visual universe through assemblies, combinations or layers, which allow new readings of the territories they travel through, in a desire to articulate and understand places transited, but fragmented and subjective.

 

Jeannie Castrec (born in Harfleur, France, 1978), is a writer. She lives and works in Ain, France. From her career in medical, social and anthropological sciences, her writing work revolves around concepts and reflections that dialogue with our modes of existence in our so-called modern societies. From romantic relationships to asserting oneself in a given environment and which necessarily influences the destiny of each; going to probe the powers of the psyche in the making of an identity or even surpassing oneself through fiction, her contribution of texts for this project takes her to fictional territories where life stories, historical archives and fabulations collide with the photographs presented.

 

Juliette Fontaine, (born in L’haÿ-les-Roses, France, 1972), is a member of an edition and distribution workshop for the printed form linked to the artistic sphere. She lives and works in Saint-Etienne, France. Her research unfolds through typographic use, hybridizations of media and printing techniques, but also, through an irreverent passion for the book, as an object of the common.

 

The meeting of these crossed glances proposes “Faire Steel”, an installation made of furniture in wooden structure, a base accommodating a photographic sculpture (model of the Steel shopping center) and an orientation table (printed map) of the invested territory proposing to consult the site report (book of pictures and texts), making castles of cards or even playing Tarot (decks of printed and marketable playing cards).

They try to turn around the value of remembering that the theatricality of public spaces offers. In the particular recording of indices of these world-cities, overloaded with signs, objects and structures, they propose to be attentive to the details that they carry in them, by their patterns or traces, which would in short be, its circumstances. Modeled, worn, and transformed material; the photographs taken are not its reproduction. They are the aesthetic argument.