EXHIBITION JULIE HASCOËT "CARRARA, THE TWILIGHT OF THE MOUNTAIN"

23 SEPTEMBER - 5 NOVEMBER 2023

Exhibition presented as part of the L'IMAGE_SATELLITE festival
Opening on Sept. 23rd at 3pm with a vernissage tour in the presence of photographers from the Gallery of the Museum of Photography, until 109.

All the programming of the festival by following these links:
L'IMAGE_SATELLITE 2023 – Sept Off (sept-off.org)
https://www.instagram.com/limage_satellite/

From the port, you can watch the waltz of container ships going out to sea;
we walk the marina – a hamlet of campsites with deserted bungalows, closed for the season;
We walk aimlessly, in the early hours of the evening, along a railway track that has forgotten its destination.

A mess of jagged cypresses line the shore, relics of a recent storm. Trucks slow down on the main road.
This is not one of those coastal towns suitable for beach tourism, not a postcard. The sea retreats, gray and dirty, a sea of metal – like the tarnished hull of ships that saturate the horizon.

In the distance, on the heights, the chain of the Apuan Alps is tinged with a pink veil as the sun descends. Sparkling, the peaks are snow-white: one could be mistaken. In Greek, marmaros means resplendent rock – yet, in this isolated corner of Tuscany, the mountain has lost its beauty, damaged by a growing industry that has devoured its peaks. The panorama is divided into several marmiferous basins, offering the walker a spectacle as fascinating as it is frightening: a relief eaten away on all sides, delivered to the voracious appetite of a myriad of ever more efficient machines. This white stone setting, which made the glory of the province, has been transformed into a tomb – a symbol of frenzied capitalism and an immoderate squandering of natural resources.

Life struggles to maintain itself.
A dull anger rises.

Carrara is known for its marbles, less for its political history.
Yet it is in this landscape of quarries with frank and cold cuts that a particular experience of revolt and insubordination has developed for centuries. Bastion of anarchism since the end of the nineteenth century, the city has seen the transmission and transformation of a set of thoughts and practices, claims and struggles which, applied to this territory and its singular geography, form a set for the least explosive.

Carrara, il crepuscolo della montagna combines photographic research with historical and militant documentation, portraying Carrara through its struggles and the evolution of its landscape. This project shows the links between political practices and a given territory – in this case, that of marble quarries – from the end of the nineteenth century to the time of the capitalocene.

This exhibition at the Gallery of the Charles Nègre Museum of Photography accompanies the release of the book Carrara, il crepuscolo della montagna published by Autonomes.
This project was realized thanks to the Gabriele Basilico International Prize for Photography, Architecture and Landscape, and received the 2023 Satellite Prize.

Biography

Julie Hascoët (born in 1989 in Douarnenez, lives and works in Brest) leads a protean work that goes beyond the strict framework of photography to embrace the fields of publishing, installation and curatorial practices. Photographer, graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles (2012), her gaze focuses on the territories on the margins and the forms generated by their occupation, mixing a poetic approach around the landscape with a more political human dimension. Since 2013, she has been co-founder and co-director of ZINES OF THE ZONE, an itinerant platform dedicated to self-published forms of the photo book and whose field of action lies between exhibition, archive and travel. Since moving to Brest in 2019, she has co-organized wild concerts and curated exhibitions. His work was recently awarded the Gabriele Basilico International Prize for Architecture and Landscape Photography.

https://www.instagram.com/j_hascoet/

FIND THE EXHIBITION PROGRAM OF THE MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY ON https://museephotographie.nice.fr/expositions/#