Jean Yves Cousseau: Pas Perdus
@ Alliance Française de Chicago
810 N Dearborn St, Chicago, IL 60610
Opening Thursday, February 6th, from 6:30PM - 8:30PM
On view through Friday, February 21st
Music performance by composer and harpist Isabelle Olivier at the vernissage.
The City of Lights is also a city of luminaries…
A photographic journey in the footsteps of Paris’s 20th-century literati, Pas Perdus is photographer Jean Yves Cousseau’s evocative tribute to French literary icon Guy Débord and the urban landscape that inspired him and his contemporaries. Cousseau’s photographs frame the city of Paris as a site of historical but also personal signficance, with this exhibition not only paying homage to the ville des lumières’ literary past but its present beauty as well.
This exhibit will feature a vernissage (opening night) on February 6, and will remain in our salon for all to see through February 21st.
Music performance by composer and harpist Isabelle Olivier at teh vernissage.
Exhibition open during our business hours.
Pas perdus: On Guy Débord’s passing through a rather short unit of time.
Pas perdus (read either as “forgotten steps” or “not forgotten”) is simultaneously a work of photography and an ode to the literary history which inspires it.
The year is 1987: Jean Yves Cousseau, who has just published his photographic exploration of forty writers living in Paris (titled “Lieux d’écrits”) – has a chance encounter with Guy Débord, one of the founding theorists of The Situationist International movement (a famous avant-garde literary movement of the late 20th century). Presented with Cousseau’s recently-published work, Débord entrusts him with a recommended list of sixty three additional authors in anticipation of a second tome. Sadly, our photographer will lose this document, but will miraculously find it once again when it is published in Débord’s posthumous Correspondances. Having rediscovered his inspiration, Cousseau will begin to tackle this new ouvrage, hoping to do service to the late Débord’s literary world by giving it photographic form. His photography, never merely illustrative, revels in both classic and iconoclastic visual techniques to portray Cousseau’s own journey through the past thirty years, while never losing sight of the manuscript that shapes the work. This “rather short unit of time” is inextricable from the years and years that informed it, placing the notion of literary permanence in conversation with the temporal specificity of the photographic image, the forgotten paces history echoing in each of the photographer’s footsteps.
Official Website
More events on this date
Tags: Alliance Française de Chicago, Chicago, Jean Yves Cousseau, Near North Side, Pas Perdus
« previous event
next event »