View Taken
Photography, postcards, 1999

Series of 15 postcards, for the exhibtion Extérieur/Intérieur (Outside/Inside) at the Villa Rohannec’h, Saint-Brieux, OODDC, curator Véronique Vauvrecy.

A postcard stand, facing the view over the bay, reverses the traditional situation. Its postcards do not show the outside perspective — but the inner panorama of the villa. This manor, originally open, in an obsessive way, to the outside, now sleeps behind closed eyelids. The outer world can only infiltrate through resistance, sending tiny beams of light through the gaps in the shutters, through bullet holes and smashed window panes reflected in broken mirrors. Jakob Gautel thus stigmatizes the outside view that has now been « taken » : recent urban constructions which have emerged on its trajectory, strive to obstruct it.

Visitors are invited to help themselves, taking with them a fragment of the villa which they haven’t seen and never will see. Actively, they participate at deconstructing / constructing the composition, dispersing the intimacy of the abandoned residence in all four directions.

Véronique Vauvrecy, in the catalogue of the exhibition Extérieur/Intérieur.


Voir aussi
#Paradise Lost #Memory #Photography #Postcards