M’attarde dans mon réduit, 2019, is an installation made up of photographs by Rachael Woodson and words by Victor Bord Ménier. A black and white photo of a boy sitting in a messy room and a slide projection of thirty-six color portraits of the same person twenty years later initiate a dialogue. The images convey a particular attention to gesture and expression, bringing to mind the way body language is read as well as how this vocabulary translates when frozen in a photograph.
Lines from a poem written in response to the original black and white photograph can be read on the walls of the exhibition space, and a voice recorded on audio cassette is heard playing in the background. The poem reflects on the photographs present in the installation, but perhaps more importantly, it reveals details inherent to the experience of photography and its multiple points of view. The title of the work, a line from the poem, interprets the disorganized room surrounding the boy in the photograph as a refuge, a place where stillness signifies a refusal.
installation views, IMMIX Galerie, Paris, 2020