Feb 19, Laboratoire en. Legend s is a creation initiated in in Echirolles, a suburb of Grenoble, having to face a difficult coexistence of communities. The idea was then developed Sarajevo, at the time of the crazy logic of ethnic purification, then in Abidjan and Dakar, these suburbs of the world where coexistence was becoming unimaginable.
He had witnessed city after city this new daily neighbourhood of a different scale, global, and he had felt an imperative to think out and invent new symbolic landmarks. Legend s is a work of art in process: firstly, Maryvonne Arnaud portrays anonymous inhabitants. This gesture is achieved with such humility and such resolution that she is allowed to reach a rare quality of intimacy with the people she photographs.
She tells them what she means to do straight away and quite simply. Her photographies are taken full face, quite close, so that each individual stands out freed from the social characteristics attached to this environment or clothes.
Ten portraits of men and five portraits of women are then chosen and sent to twelve writers who live further and further away from the place where the photos have been shot, as if on concentric circles framing the epicentre of the event. The original prints, once in the hands of each writer, paradoxically generate intimacy as in a family album of unknown ascendants.
Each writer, inspired by this proximity with the anonymous face can then write legends. All writers legend all the portraits: the result is a teeming multiplicity. This multiplicity is then recreated by associating the real-scale images and their legends. Identity, usually understood as rooted, unique, sometimes atavistic, can be widened and diversified.
