On the shoulder of time — Michel Poivert

“Photography is a pathway. It serves not only to produce images but is an ascetic practice born from analog culture that disregards distances in favor of the tangible yet invisible connection between us and the living community. Valérie Jouve’s extensive artistic and political journey, along with her anthropological and poetic quest for the reconciliation of humans with the world, materializes. Here is a visual fable, in which the values of black and white and all its gradations come to fruition in large-format photography. The instrument captures imagined realities such as rituals where time expands without ignoring history.

There is nothing idealistic in these representations of the link between humans and beings of bark and stone, but rather the staging of our need for reconnection with ourselves through sharing and homage. Far from the long-explored metropolises, away from the colonized areas that were her ethical refuge, Valérie Jouve actively considers the emotions we must seek in close proximity to sacred presences. It is not just the countryside or “nature” that is celebrated here, but, as already seen with the California cedars in the 1990s and Palestinian women in the 2000s, the power and breath of the living guided by a frequency resonated by a song.

An optical ode that Valérie Jouve knows how to extract from the depths of ages through portraits of primitive architectures of dolmens, wise ruins in the shadow of the growth of centuries-old trees around which humans seek ultimate resonances. Black and white has the virtue of abstracting time in mechanical representations; born of progress, they then have the ability to offer a primitive version of the world. It is here that we encounter the human tribe of Valérie Jouve’s characters, here we observe her modest rituals that bear witness to the fragile balance evident in the ancient traces of megaliths. A need for solace has transformed into a desire beyond images.”