France

Sabine Delcour

Biography

Sabine Delcour (b.1968) is a French photographer with a masters degree in Photographic Image from University of Paris 8. For twenty years she has worked on landscape, Delcour investigates the unique relationship of body and territory, of speech and sharing, of image and reality. Taking photos consists in occupying a “here”, a direct and insistent presence to which an “elsewhere” is linked, something outside of the frame which makes the frame more complex.

I am listing byways away from towns and cities, fleeting paths matching the nature of the ground, marginal areas where nature makes her compromises, depending on the season and the region. With time, a personal grid gradually takes shape. Destinations matter little, they are the pretext for wandering and roaming where tracks meet to challenge boundaries and shifts from the visible world to the perceptible world, wherever the landscape can be read like a history of human nature.

A photographic series based on the town of Hérouville-Saint-Clair. A commission from the Lower Normandy Contemporary Art Centre to question its own town within an exhibition devoted to the imaginary nature of spaces and their development (« Let’s Imagine, a place », 2000).
Hérouville was greatly marked by the utopias of the 1960s wich ushered in the construction of new towns in France. Without any human presence, each image in the series presents an architecture or site which aspect and/or function transform into landmark for those who travel in these parts every day. Many accounts for reading are to be found beside the pictures. Transcribed from interviews conducted with inhabitants, they tell the committed tale of these builders.

Increasingly we speak of the end of the world, as we know it, the disappearance of nature under the pressure from artificial, polluted and mistreated environments. Helplessly, we are witness to the consequences of nature being thwarted. Will we be forced to imagine ourselves in a world without horizons, limits or landscapes?

My ongoing investigations concern the relationships that we maintain with nature and the perception we have of it. Previously my studies have concentrated on inhabited territories or landscapes modified by man, and now the core of my work is centred on important geological sites, strewn with imprints and traces that recount earth’s history, its origins, and its inner depths.

Language is present in this project but not the language of men. It is now the language of stones and of the Earth that is inscribed in my images. Although we may not possess the codes to decipher this book of nature, I would like us to have, faced with the images, the profound feeling that a saga is inscribed within them.