Sowing seeds
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Work : The Odyssey.
Action to derive seeds in small boats in nutshells on a fountain in the center of Montpellier 2015.
Series of photographs, pigment prints on paper Harman Baryta, various sizes 2016.
Location : Montpellier, France, 2015.
Exhibition from October 11 to November 26, 2016, at Galerie Alice Mogabgab, Beyrouth, Liban.
Statement :
The Odyssey is Yann Dumoget’s photos exhibition at Galerie Alice Mogabgab, Beirut. In his recent photographs the artist does not concern himself with the heroic adventures of the illustrious Ulysses, but with this large wave of forced displacement, the largest in the Mediterranean region since the Roman Empire, sweeping across Europe today: the wave of migrants.
In October 2015, Yann Dumoget was invited to take part in an awareness campaign concerning the fate of the world’s migrant population. He explains: “My initial thought went out to those fragile skiffs, full to the brim with terrified people braving storms on an immense sea, to those cockle shells likely to founder from one minute to the next, amidst general indifference. Via a curious association of ideas my next thought sent me back to Calais, my early childhood city. Not the Calais of the eponymous jungle where poor wretches slide about in the freezing mud, dreaming day in, day out of the lucky ship that will take them across the Channel. But the carefree Calais era when my grandfather passed down – to the amazed young child that I was then – his method of transforming real walnuts into small boats, enabling him to travel to the far corners of his vivid imagination. Walnuts are seeds well before they become boats and ultimately, nothing better has been found for moving between different generations. We humans are also seeds, longing to open up and blossom.”
In Yann Dumoget’s photographic landscapes, tiny boat-walnut shells are floating on the calm water of a pond, in the soft autumn light. The breeze fills the sails made of leaves, pushing these delicate life-giving vessels towards other places. Here everything is calm, gentle and slow, somewhat like the painting by Pieter Breughel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where, amidst general indifference, a tragedy occured.
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