Exhibition: Émilie Delugeau – Zuhause

Opening: 12.03.2024, 7 p.m.

Talk: Émilie Delugeau with Elisa Cappellari

Exhibition: 13.03. – 20.04.2024

Home Wilderness

Home – Where can it be found? Has it ever been? Did it once exist in an unscathed state? Or has it always been a longing, a shimmering reflection of light in the shards of fragility lying before us, in the cracks of unsustainable dreams of bliss and salvation?

Home – Is it something external or rather something residing within? And the pain of searching for it, is it not the tension of the rope on which we dance between the inner realm of light and the outer darkening over the abyss of our vulnerable lives?

Landscapes of destroyed matter are visible in the photo series Zuhause by Émilie Delugeau. The intact, the surface has shattered, forming the natural shapes of the impact of uncontrollable force.

    A child stands protectively wrapped in winter clothing in a room with white walls in front of a closed, obscured window. It appears as if abandoned in the desolation of the place. Before it, a white pool in frozen explosion. A landscape of uncontrollable force as well. Has the child narrowly escaped the outbreak of violence? Or did it trigger it as the only possible salvation from the cold, the desolation, as the only viable form of life in a lifeless space? A white detonation, in which the child can find a saving wilderness, a home for a moment.

    On another white wall in another photo, a woman is almost nude. A yellow cloth around her neck drapes lightly over her upper body on the left and right. Fragile protection. Vulnerability. She looks away from the viewer towards the source of light, hidden from his eyes. A place of longing here as well. As those traces, structures, and folds, to follow and to wrap oneself in, at once giving direction and protection, promise and uncertainty.

Home – something that in this world can only be established for moments in the corners of our nomadic, transient existence and that exists permanently only in the certainty of imagination, of the heart, and not in the illusion of the tangible, unambiguous? Not in one nation or at a single place, but in that realm which is inward within us, and in which we are constantly searching, arrived in the longing that is home, beauty, and light in the uncharted, unfathomable, and living.

Fred Kelemen

This work was produced in 2020 by Villa Pérochon, a Centre for Photographic Art in Niort, France. It was made possible thanks to the support from the City of Niort, the Ministry of Culture/DRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and the Conseil Régional Nouvelle-Aquitaine.
Prints were produced in the workshops of Philippe Le Besconte’s Villa Pérochon. Framing was carried out by Émilie Grégoire at Atelier du Cadre, Niort.