FROM CALAIS
As part of Grand Arles Express 2018, the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and the FRAC Grand Large – Haut-de-France are launching a photography partnership. They will put their mutual collections together, and a first exhibition will be held, devoted to Bruno Serralongue. Since 1993, Serralongue has been taking photos of events in politics and the media, tackling the notion of objectivity in a documentary-like style. Produced as series, his photographs are shown here individually and as sets.

30 June - 19 August 2018.




Ben pilots and repairs kwassa-kwassa boats, the traditional fishing vessels of the Comoros, an archipelago on the Indian Ocean, violently divided by a border inherited from colonization. As on the Mediterranean, many risk their lives to pass from Anjouan to Mayotte, the only island of the archipelago that is still French. To escape poverty, Ben went from fishing to smuggling migrants. In this shady business, he tries as best he can to remain ethical and keep his passengers safe. He teaches this trade by dead of night to Patron. To avoid doing time, Ben is forced to make this child a “captain,” since the lad is too young to go to jail. Koropa presents this silent rite of passage, this solemn apprenticeship, the transmission of a knowledge that owes as much to trickery as to the art of piloting on a hostile ocean. Its short, radical form, its abstract space, remove the film from the traditional documentary form to trace a classical tragedy, in which two silent figures, father and child, two bodies, share a passage on the threshold of the land of the dead on an ocean peopled with phantoms. A passage recalling many others in a world where the sea rises like a border in the shape of a tomb.

30 June - 23 September 2018.