EXTRACT
“Having set out to write, utopia, I collected images, convinced they’d be a good accompaniment. Ironically, while. I’m certain of their literary potential, I’ve been asked to add some words to them as an introduction to this essay.
I turn the page. I stay here. The images parade past. Standing watch, I pull the thread, read them and connect what I see. The curved sky unrolls, the space of movement. I’m there, here and now, then further away. Objects move until they’re right in front of me. Description. I’m elsewhere and within. I follow my tracks.
At night, the sky runs quicker. Immobile, I see its lights fade. Hafez puts Hamza on my right shoulder to show me the way. This is the star to follow, until the next one. I follow a dot. There’s space around the images I fix.
Everything moves there.
Black. The colour black. In Arabic: Assouad. The light-skinned conquerors, Umayyads, named this land, this South, Bilad es sudan: the land of the blacks. You’re not in Sudan. You’re in a book. And seen from here, the earth is flat. Its space, which I want to be as hospitable as the original, shows reproductions of images, placed here rather than there in the white, like objects. I wrote the captions for them and they have been put together by several people, drawing on a varied collection of texts assembled in various ways reusing fragments of past fables, along the way, creating a series of drafts. Here, a formalist essay, a cross-between fable, description and intimacy.”
Claude Iverné, extract from Bilad es Sudan, Éditions Xavier Barral, 2017
Photographs
Claude Iverné
Texts
– Introduction by Claude Iverné
– Interview with Quentin Bajac (Chief curator of photography at MoMA of New York) by Jonas Cuénin (journalist)
24,4 x 28 cm
about 200 color and N&B images
More Information on the Exhibition “Bilad es Sudan”
Shipments to Europe only.
Only available in French.
