France, Lorraine, Hayange.
Que se passe-t-il ? Is this a question the photographer wonders to himself or asks the viewer? Whatever the scope of the question, its very existence leaves no doubt as to the political dimension of the series. In Cameroon, in the United States, Romania or the French province of Lorraine, Eric Guglielmi’s search reports on landscapes that bear witness to the economic, social and political violence that man inflicts on his fellow man and on the territories they occupy. Flimsy constructions, gutted buildings left to rot, gnawed by rust or invaded by encroaching vegetation: all traces of damage to the land. The approach taken by Eric Guglielmi relates in part to what David Campany calls “Late photography”. In Cameroon where Boko Haram terrorists kidnap and kill, in the now-dying former industrially active region of Lorraine, in Romania, scattered with Soviet-era ruins, the photographer looks at how these ill-treated spaces have made their way through time; he looks at the traumatic memories of place but also at resilience. The photographer’s commitment is perceptible. In an immense shed, he photographs a swarming mass of indistinct movement. The viewer subtly gets that countless chicks crowd the hell of an industrial facility. The works that compose Que se passe-t-il ? however remain fundamentally ambiguous. The multiple images of façades, built of brick, stone, metal, wood, face the viewer and maintain a questioning state. They leave us on the threshold of a world we can only begin to speculate about. Our gaze is sometimes caught by a slight anomaly that insinuates a feeling of unease in our perception of the order of the composition. The interpretive stance the reader takes as he sways from one image to the next defines a pace that is far from the rhythm associated with the frenzy of the media. The image invites a measured stride; it cannot be seen in one gulp of a greedy eye. The formal beauty of the images, which sometimes borders on abstraction, does not come at the expense of political impact. Rather it accompanies and sharpens the political statement. Eric Guglielmi keeps a constant eye for the fleeting instant when light, color and textures attain coherency, when the disparate parts of the setting come together to form a manifesto that is both political and aesthetic.
