Corinne Mercadier

Corinne Mercadier was born in 1955. She lives and works in Paris. Corinne Mercadier, likes to photograph indeterminate places where intringing silhouettes intersect; flying objects that draw arabesques in the sky. In her series “Suite d’Arles” and “D’Arles la suite” the act of artistic photography allows her to see the city differently, to see like she says “the memory of stones agitated by weightlessness”.

In 2013, she exhibited at the Musée Réattu in Arles and in 2014 at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm who dedicated a retrospective to her. Her work is appears in the collections of la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and FRAC, Paris.

La Suite d’Arles, 2003

Obtained as a commission from the Fond National d’Art Contemporain on the initiative of Musée Réattu d’Arles, and exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie 2003, the Suite d’Arles is accompanied by a book of the same name from éditions Filigranes. The subject of this commission was the City of Arles.

What I found was an observatory particularly well placed for seeing : The sky as the backdrop to the architecture, the immaterial mould of the mineral city. Seeing the light constrained into geometry. Seeing the wind in contact with the stone, seeing the memory of the stones moved by weightlessness.

I caused sculptures of paper and fabrics to fly. Ribbons like phylacteries unfurled within the air, black, whites, subtitles ordered by the hazards of the wind, texts mingled with the photograms of a film that was dreamed there. Obscure annunciations, images of thought in movement… Or books of gold, launched into the spaces that for some of them are sacred, like a memory captured into form.

The ten photographs of the Suite d’Arles have close links with the previous series, Une fois et pas plus.