The critique of a technicist and abstract modernity passes through a direct experience and an observation of the world, through an engagement of the body that aims at a physical and symbolic reappropriation. It is a way of walking the land both to reveal the state of the territory and to redefine our place within it, our being-in-the-world. Yao Jui-Chung, Eric Tabuchi, and Nelly Monnier are such surveyors of our modernity. These artists use photography as a critical protocol—a means to shed light on the hierarchies of the visible. Yao Jui-Chung catalogs the colossal statues of deities scattered across the land, while employing the visual language of the image to question their dominant position. By immersing these gods and goddesses in a picture saturated with urban chaos, he interrogates the human condition, woven from entangled beliefs between the worship of the sacred and that of modernity. Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier also challenge the cosmogony of our territories through their photographic gestures. Using consistently centered composition and color, their images extract their subjects from their ordinary context.
The photographs shown here belong to the Atlas des régions naturelles (Atlas of natural regions) project, initiated in 2017 by Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier. For nearly a decade, the duo has traveled across metropolitan France following an original territorial framework—the “natural” regions. These are not official administrative entities, but territories sharing a common cultural heritage. This surveying has gradually formed photographic archives focused on “architectures without architects,” following an unchanging photographic protocol. For this exhibition, Nelly Monnier and Eric Tabuchi diverted their route to cover an area corresponding to the Taiwanese islands projected onto French territory. By superimposing the center of France and Taiwan, they created an imaginary archive of a palimpsest country.