Radio Ballast
François-Xavier Gbré
Atelier EXB
English
Hardcover with 8 page foldout
104 pages
220 × 263 mm
2025
ISBN 9782365114592
François-Xavier Gbré is drawn to traces. For the past fifteen years or so, he has been photographing the imprints of human activity on the landscape and architecture of the African continent. In 2023, as part of the Latitudes support program developed by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, he set out to follow the railway that runs from north to south through Côte d’Ivoire. The line was built during the French colonial era to extract the country’s natural resources and transport them to the port of Abidjan, then on to the metropole. Gbré’s photographs are infused with a kind of latent historicity made up of multiple overlapping temporal layers: the colonial period, the post-Independence years, and more recent events. Radio Ballast is the title of the project. Radio refers to the device that transmits information, while ballast is the bed of crushed rock on which the rails lie. In railway jargon, the term also refers to rumors of uncertain origin: vague, unfounded news, a mixture of assumptions and gossip, interwoven and often contradictory narratives. It’s easier to imagine that such rumors come from the tracks themselves. History often resembles such a rumor. It is never simple, but rather diverse, entangled, or refracted. It falls to the artist to propose forms of synthesis. That is precisely what François-Xavier Gbré sought to represent here.
(Source: phmuseum.com/exhibitions/radio-ballast-by-francois-xavier-gbre)
About the Artist
Born in 1978 in Lille, France. François-Xavier Gbré lives nand works between La Rochelle (France) and Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). Steeped in time and geography, Gbré’s work draws on the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. From colonial remains to landscapes redefined by current events, Gbré explores territories and revisits History. The constant dialogue with his environment leads him to use different scales and exhibition methods, whether crafting meticulous installations based on thorough investigations of the land, or using architecture itself to make photography resonate through a physical relationship with the viewer or the public space. His work has been shown in Paris and Abidjan at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, which represents him, at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, the Venice Biennale in Italy, in Madagascar, Nigeria, the United States, and various European countries. His works are included, among others, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm, Germany – New York, USA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), the Collection of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (France), and the FNAC – Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France). In 2020, François-Xavier Gbré was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. In 2024, he becomes the first laureate of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Latitudes program.
francoisxaviergbre.com
(Source: phmuseum.com/exhibitions/radio-ballast-by-francois-xavier-gbre)
About the Publisher
Atelier EXB publishes books taking a visual approach to the new shapes of photography, contemporary art and sciences. Founded in 2002 by Xavier Barral, and taken over in 2020 by the five members of the team (Jordan Alves, Nathalie Chapuis, Yseult Chehata, Charlotte Debiolles and Perrine Somma), the publishing house conceives each book where form and content meet to tell a singular history. Raising curiosity through the image and bringing one to discover new artistic voices, subjects in resonance with today’s world. What the photographic image says of our world? Atelier EXB is a space for creation, curiosity, and openness to the world.
https://www.setantabooks.com
(Source: https://www.setantabooks.com/collections/editions-xavier-barral)
