Radio Ballast - UK

For over a year, François-Xavier Gbré travelled the territories crossed by the railway, photographing wagons, stations, maintenance workshops, but also the diversity of the landscapes.

François-Xavier Gbré is an Ivorian photographer whose artistic practice explores territories and revisits history. His work is particularly interested in the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. As part of his prize-winning "Latitudes' program, he has chosen to embark on the railway line linking Abidjan to Niger. Built in the former French West Africa (AOF), the line was once dedicated to transporting raw materials from Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Niger, as part of an extractivist approach, and is still active today, but only for freight. The small stations, typical of colonial modernist architecture, and certain sections of the railway are now abandoned: the luxuriant nature of the regions crossed has gradually infiltrated, invading waiting rooms, sheds and dilapidated ballast... For over a year, François-Xavier Gbré travelled the territories crossed by the railway, photographing wagons, stations, maintenance workshops, but also the diversity of the landscapes. His images are charged with a certain melancholy: that of a look at the passage of time on matter. In counterpoint to photographs of landscapes bathed in light and exuding the humidity of the earth, there is a series of images of fragments of matter: surfaces peeled back by the passage of time or eaten away by rust... Little by little, an old-fashioned atmosphere emerges from these places, a sensation of suspended time: the journey to which the photographer invites us speaks of a history that may be long gone, but whose echoes still resonate in territories long divided by the colonial presence, and whose imprint endures despite the vagaries of nature and man. As Clément Chéroux, curator of the eponymous exhibition to be presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson this autumn, explains, the title of the present work, Radio Ballast, evokes "the jargon of railwaymen, the expression designating rumors of unknown origin: vague and unfounded news, a mixture of presuppositions and gossip, layers of intermingled and often contradictory discourse'.