BÉRANGÈRE FROMONT
Born in 1975 in Martigues (France).
Lives and works in Paris (France)
Bérangère Fromont is a French photographer. For some fifteen years now, intimate, collective and literary references, documentary and mise-en-scène, have blended and articulated around the central notion of her work: resistance. Her photographs are exhibited internationally and are the subject of various web and print publications. Five books have been published, one for each of her projects. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Foam Paul Huf Prize. L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs was selected for the Prix du livre des Rencontres d'Arles. Her last two projects were supported by Cnap. She is currently resident at Poush, an artist incubator in Aubervilliers.
Image above (detail) : Sans titre, 2022-2023. "L’amour seul brisera nos cœurs" series. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle FineArt Photo Rag paper 308 mg. 45 x 30 cm
Bérangère Fromont focuses her photographic work on the notion of resistance: individual or collective resistance, political struggles, quests for visibility, but also the action of resisting, as a life force. In 2016, she immersed herself in a long-term project - “Except the clouds” - about the Athenian revolts, looking at the place of the human in the chaos of History.
At the beginning of 2023, the artist began a photographic project that mirrored “Except the clouds”. It seemed important to her to direct her reflections to the heart of her city, Paris. More precisely, to the emblematic Place de la République, which she crosses daily and which is so historically and physically linked to the idea of resistance.
A Parisian nerve center where Parisians spontaneously gather to demonstrate, celebrate or pay homage, the Place de la République represents the legacy of the Enlightenment, democracy and freedom. It escapes all social categorization. For many, it symbolizes the humanist values that France would like to be universal.Through this photographic series, Bérangère Fromont highlights what unites us through time: bodies, emotions, struggles. An huge love of freedom. The artist uses the evocative, haunting power of photography to summon the ghosts of the past. To do this, she sets up a strict work process: photographing the central statue and its pedestal, passers-by, animals, movements, objects, traces, light and shadows, every day for two years. At the same time, she collects the flyers and transforms them into paper sculptures. These fragile sculptures, folded at random, stand up almost miraculously, resisting falling, freezing an instant doomed to disappear, like the act of photography.
Bérangère Fromont's Place de la République series paints a fragmented portrait of a city, torn between revolts such as those seen today, and moments of peace when conflict always seems a possibility. But also tranquility. The artist seeks to transcribe these two forces in permanent equilibrium, while telling the story of a place as witness to a collective history. With an interest in youth, scarred by the recent past and anxiety about the future, a living metaphor for this tension. Like skateboarders, who tirelessly throw themselves into the void to find balance on the edge of a precipice, a resistance to the fall, searching for the fulcrum of grace. Finding beauty in the fragility of that precise place between life and death, shadow and light.
Image above: Sans titre, 2024. "République” series. Pigment print on Awagami Murakumo white 42g Japanese paper
RÉPUBLIQUE
L'AMOUR SEUL BRISERA
NOS CŒURS
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs was born out of a desire to fill the gaps in representations of queer identities, to reclaim our narratives and thereby our intimacy, to reclaim a place in the public space at the same time as in art history. Fighting against erasure, invisibilization, using photography as both medium of revelation and archive. “Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent”, wrote Monique Wittig in Les Guérillères (1969).
We now know that intimacy is political. It's about love and revolution. The book L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs is a free exchange between my images and the texts of Gorge Bataille (aka Élodie Petit): “We inhabit what we can: earthenware, the bathtub, the council flat, the sidewalk, we build a shack. From beginning to end, we use love as a means of collective survival” (Fiévreuse plébéienne, 2022).
I invite volunteers - their participation in the project becomes a political act at the same time - to come and play out their love and their relationship with outer space in front of the camera, at night, in the streets of Paris. I provoke a situation of tension in which the couples are also active and creators of images. These images then become the material with which I work: I reframe, I cut out, I make sequences. The notion of fragmentation is at the heart of the project. There are several reasons for this, one of which is to enable a universal, non-documentary identification, and the other, an escape from the subject and figuration. I'm interested in love as a revolutionary force whose ultimate goal is to “make freedom”. - Bérangère Fromont
Image above: Sans titre, 2022-2023. "L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs” series. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle FineArt Photo Rag 308 mg paper. 45 x 30 cm
Athens is an oxymoron-city. Its flamboyant mythological heritage coexists with its dark and dramatic political and economic situation. Its sun shines brightly but crushes its streets. It's a blinding light that reveals its violence and twilight faces. And yet, there's a force of life here that's far more intense than elsewhere. The idea of resistance takes on its full meaning. Bodies tirelessly rise up as one against the chaos of history. In permanent revolution.
My project is to capture this oxymoron in images, but also the complexity of the contemporary in its different temporal strata - past, present and future all at once, like a set of ever-changing relics. What remains when everything collapses?
Digital manipulations, reappropriation of archives and geometric composition combine to form a single, hybrid image, the sum of all these different temporalities, creating a fresco of the present. As in the streets of the city, where the ancient and the contemporary meet up and intertwine. Presenting the immensity of a moment, extended and spread out, in distinct dimensions of time and space.
With Walter Benjamin's sentence always in mind, like an invisible, obsessive thread, look for the light in the ruins of Attica: “In a landscape where nothing was recognizable except the clouds, and in the middle, in a field of forces crossed by tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny, fragile human body”. - Bérangère Fromont
“Benjamin's text, which gave the title to Bérangère Fromont's book Except the Clouds, speaks of the impossibility for a generation to find in the experience of war a moral or political reference point for confronting a world in ruins. What appears in principle to be a book of photographs, becomes by its very title a profound reflection on the experience of history and the way in which young Athenians in revolt, take hold of History and confront societies that can no longer think the future by learning from their past.” - Laura Carbonell (Founder of Punto de Fuga, Bogota).
Image above: Sans titre, 2018. "Except the clouds" series. Pigment print on 110g white Awagami Kozo Japanese paper. 40 x 30 cm
EXCEPT THE CLOUDS
David De Beyter, Thomas Devaux, Bérangère Fromont & Jonathan Sullam
Paris, France
CV
Born in 1985 in Martigues (France).
Lives and works in Paris (France).
Resident Poush since 2020
EXPOSITIONS PERSONNELLES / SOLO SHOWS
2022
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, Delpire, Paris, France
2019
Except the clouds, Offshoot Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Except the clouds, Galerie Minimum, Palermo, Italy
Except the clouds, Galerie L'Aberrante, Le Crès, France
2018
I don't want to disappear completely, Wall/Paper #4, Le Bal, Paris, France
EXPOSITIONS COLLECTIVES / GROUP SHOWS
2024
Paris Photo, galerie Bacqueville, Grand Palais, Paris, France
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, duo show, Galerie Gardette, Paris, France
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, exposition La Flamme, Mains d'OEuvres, Saint-Ouen, France
République, POUSH pour Art Paris, Aubervilliers, France
2023
Insomnie, POUSH Paris+ par Art Basel, Aubervilliers, France
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, POUSH Paris+ par Art Basel, Aubervilliers, France
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, Festival Photo Saint-Germain, Paris, France
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, Warsaw Museum, Poland
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, projection Espace Croisière, Les Rencontres d'Arles, France
I don't want to disappear completely, Festival de Yenne, France
2022
Except the clouds, Matia Mou Festival, Nantes, France
Except the clouds, Medphoto4 : Democraty Contemporary Art Museum of Crete, Greece
2020
I don't want to disappear completely, Festival Quartier d'été, Paris
2019
Except the clouds, Festival Noorderlicht Gröningen, Netherlands
I don't want to disappear completely, La Plate-forme Dunkerque, Centre d’art contemporain, France
2018
I don't want to disappear completely, CACN Centre d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes, France
Except the clouds, SKG Bridge Festival Thessalonique, Grèce
Except the clouds, Family of no man, Arles, France
I don't want to disappear completely, Festival Satellite Nice, France
Except the clouds, Thessaloniki photo biennale, Thessalonica, Greece
2017
I don't want to disappear completely, Festival Circulation(s), Centre Photographique de Clermont-Ferrand, France
I don't want to disappear completely, Jeune Création, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin, France
I don't want to disappear completely, Busan International Photography Festival, South Korea
I don't want to disappear completely, Festival Photo Saint Germain, Paris, France
2016
Cosmos, Krakow Photomonth, Poland
2015
Cosmos, Les Boutographies, Montpellier, France
Cosmos, Festival Manifesto, Toulouse, France
PRIX & BOURSES / AWARDS
2024
Finaliste résidence CPIF - Centre photographique d'Île-de-France, Pontault-Combault, France
2023
Bourse photographie documentaire pour le projet République / CNAP
Finaliste Prix Foam Paul Huf / Top 15
Finaliste Prix du Livre Photo-Textes / Festival Les Rencontres d'Arles
Finaliste prix Transverse Freelens / ADAGP
Finaliste prix UTOPIE
2021
Bourse Soutien à un projet artistique pour le projet L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs / CNAP
Finaliste prix Transverse Freelens / ADAGP
2019
Prix du jury et du public Mentor
Finaliste Gomma Grant 2019
Bourse d'aide à la publication, Institut Français d'Athènes
LIVRES / BOOKS
2024
Reconstruct, Surface Editions
2022
L'amour seul brisera nos cœurs, A la Maison
2021
Encore somnolent, je déployais mes oreilles en fleur, cur. : Rebekka Deubner, le rayon vert . éditions
Paradigma, A La Maison
2018
I don't want to disappear completely, September Books
Except the clouds, Void
Hunger (with Antoine D’Agata, Erik Kessels, Joan Fontcuberta, J.H Engstrom), Void
2017
Catalogue Jeune, September Books
2016
Cosmos, André Frère Éditions
PUBLICATIONS / PRESS
2024
ERSILIA, Plateforme pédagogique, Le Bal
Einige Fotobücher, einige Gedanken avec Andreas Langfeld et Elisabeth Neudörfl
Technikart
Beauty Paper Magazine
Safelight Paper
2023
The British Journal of Photography, interview by Gem Fletcher
HOTHOTHOT Magazine
2022
Les Inrockuptibles
Manifesto 21 entretien avec Constanza Spina
Brainto
2021
Couleurs Primaires, le podcast
Gaze
2020
Vogue Italia
Gup Magazine
The British Journal of Photography
Lensculture interview Sophie Wright
Interview Fisheye la revue
2019
Interview for Punto de Fuga with Laura Carbonell
American Suburb X / americansuburbx.com, text by Brad Feuerhelm
Phasesmag
PH Museum
Revue Mouvement
Fisheye Photobook volume 2
DieNacht Magazine
One image story cur. : Maria Kapajeva
Co-curate Magazine #2 Adolescences
Interview Fisheye Magazine
Publication Volume 2 Blacklie
Yet Magazine.com
Exposition en ligne Galerie le Lac Gelé, Nîmes
Publication dans Witty Kiwi Mag #4
Publication dans Der Greif