The photographic work of Valérie Jouve has developed around two entities: Humans and landscapes, and more generally the city and its outskirts. Each image is constructed around the notion of an encounter between bodies, whether they are individuals, architectures, or landscape components. Thus, when Valérie Jouve photographs people, while the image is the pretext for the meeting, in the end, it’s the meeting that becomes the pretext for the image. While the photograph is only a surface, it becomes a means of relaying a certain form of empathy.
Valérie Jouve approaches the photographic medium not as a way of showing, but more to feel and stimulate the viewer’s intuitive rapport. While each work retains its own autonomy, the work spreads out in space. Like a musical composition, Valérie Jouve considers the hanging of works as a way of producing motion that arises from the coexistence between images.
It is therefore natural that Valérie Jouve turned to motion pictures, making her first film, Grand Littoral, in Marseille, as early as 2003. During a trip in 2008, Valérie Jouve discovers Israel and the Palestinian Autonomous Territories. Fascinated, she undertakes the long task of collecting, through photography and film, whatever forms their identity – capturing the characters and the daily representation of their cities, making them act like emblematic figures.
This new personal exhibition at Galerie Xippas is the occasion to present her new film, Traversée (Crossing). Begun in 2010, this film is a road movie crossing five Palestinian cities (A book, entitled Portrait de six villes palestiniennes, featuring a series of 150 images is due to be released by Actes Sud in spring 2014):
“The crossing of the territory is dictated by a quirky and improbably trio: a child, a puppeteer and his puppet, and his poorly-identified double (as an element creating ties). Their relationship is tender, but tumultuous. These two characters are not the protagonists of the film, but more couriers of this territory. They bring the human relationships back into play, extracted from a simple reading of the conflict, to restore another reality of life there.” – Valérie Jouve

At the same time, Valérie Jouve presents a series of still images, as if taken out of the film. The contemplative gaze inspired by the landscapes in large format is constantly vitalized by images of passers-by that throw the visitor into the turmoil of the city. At eye level, the lines trace bridges; the bodies are echoed to form an atmosphere where the images literally accompany the flow of visitors, thereby creating the necessary interactions for the meeting. Valérie Jouve’s photographs extend outside their framework, beyond what they represent; they examine the body’s affinities in relation to a place, and the way in which bodies construct these places. This exhibition confirms her choice to use the film medium (view camera and 16 mms.) as a body in itself.