For its thirteenth edition and continuing last year’s programme, the Promenades photographiques de Vendôme is continuing its reflection on the theme Qui est photographe? Odile Andrieu, the festival’s artistic director, tells us about the 2017 programme.
Eleven years ago, Jean Baudrillard was dreaming about a wall of images that we were going to present in the Château’s Orangerie. That year, 2006, we were right at the beginning, we were opening there for the first time, the space was too small and we weren’t allowed to have more than twenty photographs, a long way from the wall of images he’d dreamt about.
This was to be Jean Baudrillard’s second exhibition in France and it was a great success, an unbelievable discovery for those who knew his literary work but were ignorant of the existence of his photographic works. Eleven years later it’s with a great deal of emotion that his dream has become a reality: the contemporary art gallery in the Musée de Vendôme will host three walls of images. Initially a group of sixty-one photographs was to be shown at the Manège Rochambeau along with the work of nine other, equally talented photographers.
Unfortunately, a stone inventory at the same time did not allow it, the activity wasn’t compatible with the goods and insurance services … Despite the artists, partners and benefactors joining forces, nothing could be done, the State’s priority was to produce this inventory in 2017, without any possibility of coexistence. So the nine artists were dispersed, the settings revisited. The networks were mobilised to find substitute locations, thank you to all of you vendômois, neighbours, people from here and there who chose to go along with us on this quest.
You will find Daniel Ablin’s ghosts in the tiny chapel Saint-Pierre-La-Motte, the intimacy of Ingrid Milhaud’s work in the former Chamber of Accounts of the Counts and Dukes of Vendôme, in the House of Wine at the little railway station of Thoré-la-Rochette, Patrick Rimond and Hudros will speak to us about water and concrete. You will travel on the five continents, in the streets and gardens coming across life-size portraits of Chinese people, a little treasure hunt all along your walk.
Japan, Senegal, Australia, Congo, the United States, Brazil, Belgium, France amongst others, so many journeys to go on to varying photographic styles and even encounter the other, to build bridges and not walls. I hope all of you enjoy the walk.
Odile Andrieu
Odile Andrieu is the artistic director of the Promenades Photographiques festival in Vendôme.
13e Promenades photographiques de Vendôme
From 24th June to 3rd September 2017
At different locations in Vendôme
France
www.promenadesphotographiques.com
