Yann Pocreau
"Yann Pocreau" by Marie-Eve Beaupré, Fall 2008, p. 163
Yann Pocreau is interested in architecture’s latent content, narrative potential and dormant histories. He envisions his work as a dialogue with the nature of the spaces he photographs. His strategies of representation are like exercises in empathy, and are directed toward developing formal relationships between a body and a place. His exhibition “Les dialogues acrobatiques” comprised two new series of photographs consisting of seven large-format images that realign architecture’s symbolic weight.
The Théâtre d’Arras, in northern France, is a photogenic venue. Engaging with its sumptuous architecture requires that one take on its history, in particular its survival of the massive bombardment of the city during the First World War. The artist seeks to establish points of contact with this building and its miraculous fate. The series On ne sait jamais où tombent les bombes (Théâtre d’Arras) (which translates as “you never know where the bombs may fall”) shows us a person bombarded by the structure’s history. Through staged acts of acrobatic physicality, the artist encourages reflection on the psychic dimensions of place.
The other series exhibited, Se fueron los curas (“the priests have gone”), transports us to a seminary in Huesca, Spain, that was abandoned after the decline of the Franco regime. The sobriety of the setting allows light—a key symbol in Christianity—to dominate each image. The artist, sensitive to the city’s political history, assumes poses in which he seems to withdraw into the light source.
With “Les dialogues acrobatiques,” Pocreau re-engages with the history of specific places to produce mini-narratives, not out of reverence for the past but for the pleasure of fictionalizing their historical import. While setting is employed as a material, the textual elements that accompany the images provide an additional narrative engine. As photographer and creator, and sometimes both subject and narrator, Pocreau treats writing as a platform for establishing narrative tensions between image and text; he orchestrates points of encounter between words and images. The formatting of the text—its punctuation, rhythm and arrangement—creates an image of another kind. In his writings, Pocreau divulges off-camera circumstances relating to the photographs; it is where he inscribes the body in space and takes the pulse of its interactions with its surroundings.
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