(sample from La Nuée, 2016)
LA NUÉE (THE CLOUD)
1166 digital photographs, Eric Caligaris, 2016.
Like the text of the Samothrace with whom she dialogues, the cloud of photographs of this work goes back almost twenty years. Eric Caligaris began this series of "photographic" blurs in 2005, first from paper documents - he then takes photographs of migrants, detention camps, cargo ships, traps, group receptions on the ground. docks, isolated individuals - then on the screen, from the miniature photos found on the search engines of the web, to illustrate the issue of laissez-passer in Europe. For the Samothraces, 1166 of them he used. These photographs are digital, and blurs directly-made when shooting, approaching the screen to the maximum, without effect or editing. That is, without allowing the camera to focus, without perspective, without white balance or depth of field.
« I over shoot existing images by spontaneously reframing parts within which I find my own marks and sensory zones. So I compose new images from the alteration of the first, in the aberrations that my camera offers me and that I control on the screen. The result has nothing to do with the original images and, when it still happens, I do not hold them "wrote Eric Caligaris. "Often, it is the backgrounds that are decisive; secondary characters or parts of sets. In the position of spectator, voyeur, curious, not hostage, I will look beyond the com-position to recreate another image. It is a spontaneous diversion carried out first with the eyes, in a first reading, and which can still be accentuated in the monitor of the apparatus (...) I try to define ratios of masses or lines of force in the framing that will make me say that it is there, I catch what I see. »
To this technique, he gave the name of "Trouble", because of its dual meaning in French and English: results of selected accidents, aberrations of "on photographs", which allow the discovery of the image. It was inaugurated in 2004 with a series of photographs of vignettes of films taken in television programs that will appear first in videos or posters, such as those exhibited at the House of History in Blagnac. The Troubles can be seen as the smooth counterpart of a search for graphic interventions on media (Masks, Biffures), the author having drawn a lot on advertisements, by diverting them in particular, as for example with the Ralepapiers published in the journal Eponyme by Éric Pessan, published by] oca Seria. Some of these series are crossed, stroked, streaked and have been formatted to recreate a regularity after dissolving it. This model makes it possible to read the image and the landscape differently, the individual and the whole, the microscopic and the macroscopic. Other series of disturbances photo-graph illustrate it:
- Series I, ll, lll, Politi, cohorts of characters, spectral figures and undecided silhouettes to whom the artist lends an experience, in the form of apocryphal archives: snatches of false memorial or false police file (texts and films commenting and illustrating these characters),
- Coma, bursts of cities (dis) appeared in magazines.
- The classic Temptations, variations in prisms of details of landscape and vegetable backgrounds of classic paintings, like those of Raphael or Claude Gelée Le Lorrain, that the photographer, become almost painter for the occasion, scrutinizes for their forms, their obscure light, their against-light.
Interviewed by the publisher.
LESS (SOUNDS)
2016-2019, Eric Caligaris.
LESS is a suite of electroacoustic pieces some of which, from the UEVM project, were made in 2003 from a soundwalk by Nicole Caligaris during the writing of Barnum des Ombres (Vertical). Respirations, strata and sound syntheses are drawn from two itinerant recordings. The sequences, made of patterns and sound textures taken from audio sources, redefine the rhythms of walking, evolution or discontinuity in a condensed urban soundscapes. Two compositions (PAR-TIR-TA -TA-TA I, II) came to increase this series with a projection during a reading at the bookstore La Briqueterie Concept Store in Nice with Madeleine Assas, Didier Flamand and Sybil Gerault. Two new pieces (IOP and Rivedere Dublino) will be listened during the three dates of the festival.