BRUNO SERRALONGUE. Chemins cherches, chemins perdus, transgressions

Bruno Serralongue’s new solo exhibition at Air de Paris borrows its title from Henri Michaux’s collection of poems. Through «Chemins cherchés, chemins perdus, transgressions» there will be question of struggle for land elsewhere, for migrants (Calais, 2006-2008, 2015-ongoing) or here for temporary inhabitant and residents of the Zone to Defend (ZAD) (Notre Dame des Landes, 2014-ongoing).

[…] Faced with the omnivorously scattershot mass media and their thirst for the novel and the spectacular, Bruno Serralongue urges leisureliness and detachment from the topical. Faced with information overload, he urges minimality. Faced with the speed that governs news, trade, money flow and transport, he urges slow persistence. Serralongue portrays people who resist, who are unyielding – minority figures who in spite of everything manage to get through to the public and appropriate a space in the media. His visual strategy ties in with their communication strategies: since the mid-90s, from Chiapas to Mumbai via Cuba, Washington and Geneva, he’s been tracking the rise and structuring of the altermondialist movement, looking to media pomp and ceremony for the filters and protocols that shape the making of his photographs. His experience with what goes on out of shot has set him straight about the scripting of reality that goes into the process of fabricating information. His store of images is not intended to illustrate current events or provide the media with an open archive; it exists, rather, to offer the counter-information Gilles Deleuze was referring to when he defined art as an act of resistance. Information that resists. A different gearing of the production of images. Serralongue belongs to the self-media: he’s a transceiver functioning independently of the professional information sphere. The self-media artist processes, produces and diffuses not contingent on the binary dictates of the mass media, their power games and their logic of instant gratification. He works on subjects he is committed to, in a reflexive time frame, in a different relationship to events, in a temporality free of obligatory, self-imposed spectacle. The counter-information provided by his investigations of media functioning combats the fragmentation of an experience he sees as constituting a whole. Like Karl Kraus, the pioneer media critic of the 1930s, he is telling us that there is no objectivity other than artistic objectivity. Going counter to the media’s falsified reality are the artist’s alter-images. Recent years have seen Serralongue’s practice evolve in line with his attention to situations having to do with the human, social and political scenes: the Florange steelworks issue, the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport project, the refugee camps at Calais and the first decade of a new nation, Kosovo. A long-term working relationship based on collaboration with his chosen territories and their inhabitants has given him a real understanding of the human and environmental issues involved. In the wake of «Campfires», his major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2010, the more recent «The Earth is a Crocodile», at MAMCO in Geneva in 2015, was his chance to bring his areas of investigation together and help us reconsider the way our community of living systems inhabits today’s world; the point being that contemporary history can be recorded using the tools and visual thinking of photography. […]
Pascal Beausse, 2016