Picto Foundation continues its support to the Promenades Photographiques for the 18th edition which will take place in Vend\u00f4me and several surrounding towns from July 2. On the program, 23 exhibitions are offered to visitors, around the theme In Situ & Landscape(s). Picto is also committed to education by supporting Campus International, a residency dedicated to students from international schools and by partnering with the Mark Grosset Prize which rewards young photography students each year.<\/p>\n
The gaze slides along a bare shoulder, a charming fleshy hill. It bounces into the Icelandic nature and takes the BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral) to reach the Greek islands and their indigenous inhabitants and refugees from the African continent.<\/p>\n
Other landscapes, In Situ, tree-picture rails, magic lanterns, light boxes plunged into darkness, videos at the bottom of giant nests and some other installations will leave you wondering. The red expressed in Christine Spengler’s baroque exvotos is the blood shed in the streets and countryside, it wards off wars. Expression of an interior landscape, her own. \u201cI did not paint war scenes to prevent war; I would never have had this pretension,\u201d said Otto Dix in 1946, \u201cI painted them to ward off war. All art is conjuration. “. The landscapes are multiple, such as it is in Angevin land, dear to du Bellay, that the two rivers join the river to flow into the \u201cmonstrous Ocean\u201d: In situ, Landscape(s) of Braye, Loir and of Loire. For this 18th edition of the Photographic Walks Festival, Odile Andrieu invites us to explore landscapes. Natural, urban, static, furrowed, raw, inhabited, naked, disappeared, deconstructed\u2026 We are immersed in real and imaginary landscapes; do we take the time to look at them, to think about them? Real, they were shaped by nature then reworked by man, locally through his intervention, globally through his influence on climate change. Imaginary, they offer us poetic and liberating breaths that so many people still lack today. Photography is essential to building a better future. It shows the present: the damage caused by an economic system under the control of large transnational groups and by the madness of the narratives that we have chosen to introduce to you again this year.<\/p>\n
This edition will not, however, tell the story of the war, it deals with those who live on this earth, admittedly in suffering. Despite everything, there remain poets, the photographers we present are among them. They allow us to understand their world, to escape, to reach out to each other, to discover other cultures, curiosity is not a bad flaw!<\/p>\n
While we are preparing this edition, the world is moving, human tragedies and conflicts are occurring. Let us not forget in these difficult times to listen again, to read and reread St\u00e9phane Hessel, to be outraged. \u201cThe citizen is the one who is outraged when the city is called into question.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 Odile Andrieu Verguin, Artistic Director of Promenades Photographiques<\/p>\n