In his brand new work, Attraction, Christian Milovanoff plays a strange game based on reproducing his own archives, deconstructing them, and also on the idea of pure photographic recording, which he will also unpack and transform. Collecting images of the world, whether made by him or not, is no longer sufficient. What’s important is to ascribe meaning to this raw material. To organise, sort through, index, choose, cut, file, mount, juxtapose, oppose, bring closer, harmonise, unroll, work on, align, sequence, deploy, permute, re-cut, link up, repeat, telescope, space out, formulate, place, displace, replace, duplicate, glue, blow up or shrink ... This is how Attraction was born and how it patiently constructed itself. Christian Milovanoff makes his own the Jean-Luc Godard formula: ‘Editing, my most precious concern’. For him, this means making images resonate with each other and observing what happens. To associate them, put them one on top of the other; to observe through a negative both sides of a newspaper page, to shoot the resulting splice (and, if nothing happens then, start again with different lighting, different composition— or simply give up on that attempt). To archive, frame, copy in order to organise ‘what is seen’; to impose order on the chaos of what is visible through narratives in which fiction draws on documentary and vice-versa... The titles Christian Milovanoff confers on each of his ‘attractions’ are keys with which to unlock and grasp the poetic, political enigma of the editing process: ‘The South’, when it’s the skeleton of an automobile resting in the planet’s lower hemisphere; ‘Mesopotamia’, wherein aeroplanes fly over a map showing the archaeological sites of Assyria—or else, more lightly but with no less efficiency, ‘Four-four-two-one’, in which a single image highlights two footballers accompanied by their own shadows.

P-L R.