CLOSE

by Christian Ingrao
Research director at the CNRS
Director of the Institute of the History of the Present Time

We know that the imaginary equilibrium of Western society is centered on processes of compartmentalization, whose principles have been exhaustively studied by sociologists who are Norbert Elias’ successors and followers. The ICUs of hospital emergency rooms, municipal slaughterhouses, the action zones of military forces in exterior operations … these spaces share two fundamental characteristics: they are deliberately cut off from normalized Τόποι (places, in Greek) in everyday society, and they allow certain practices and events in them which go (far) beyond the ordinary. Accidents, culling, combat, detention: this first list would not be complete without appending a complete list of places where men and women are confined, which Western societies have added in increasing numbers during the course of their evolving liberal modernity. One of the most prevalent activities, going beyond any guarantee of fundamental freedom -- are those of initiating, possessing and now locking people up.
 
Grégoire Korganow’s project takes this reality into account, at the very least initially. It is imperative that one fully explore the process of confinement and compartmentalization to be able to grasp its various porosities.

 

The penitentiary world as seen by the artist
 

            It is an understatement to note that Korganow spent a long time closely observing the carceral establishments which are scattered around France. For a long time he worked as someone inspecting spaces in which freedom is constricted or absent, which made him one of the few people with an all access pass to any French carceral establishment.
 
After having shot thousands of frames, Korganow took a long hiatus, then decided to drastically change his approach to the work. Having documented in great detail the terrible dilapidated conditions in the prisons and the harsh conditions for the detainees, he chose a more lateral, oblique approach, more complex, more ‘polyphonic,’ a way of illuminating the lost continent of prisons in an entirely new way.
 
He chose a structure in three parts. First, he recorded photographically the spaces directly next to the most recent detention centers. Then he approached the detainees through their families and friends, shooting their portraits after meeting with them. Finally he established epistolary and research relationships with some of the detainees, asking them about their dream worlds, assembling the dreams and showing them in diverse forms, including handwritten letters and the reading of dream stories out loud on video. In direct constrast to the flat out confrontations chosen in his earlier work, Korganow opted for a strategy of sliding into the cracks, the hollows, the silences, the private moments.

“We learn about water through our thirst
And the earth through our sea voyages —"

It was in these terms that Emily Dickinson — translated by Charlotte Mélançon — described the principle of this new work although it is clear that Grégoire Korganow tries also to make us see the insides of these prisons through what seeps out.

 

 

Exploring porosities
 

            Perhaps the artist is only sort of circling the carceral world without really taking it on? First impressions are misleading: far from avoiding the subject or hedging his bets, Grégoire Korganow has chosen to place himself exactly where the structures of compartmentalization are likely to have subtle porosities which he may then explore at his convenience.
 
So he focuses his attention and his camera lens on the existing interface between the penitentiary and the outside world, on the spaces which are located directly next to the prisons built in the early part of the 21stcentury. These spaces are not yet detention areas or places where freedom is taken away, but somehow they seem to no longer belong to the “open” world, with some largely invisible stigmata which marginalizes and isolates them.
 
Then he examines what these people who are re-living Orpheus’ journey -- bring back from the visiting room where they saw the detainees. Friends, lovers, spouses, parents, children, even grandchildren carry something from these rare moments, fleeting -- and predictable when detention and separation fade. This something, Korganow finds it and shares it in a compelling gallery of portraits.
 
Finally there is a kind of escape hatch which prison watchtowers and ubiquitous surveillance cannot affect, although the escape is mostly intangible and via an interior dreamscape. Dreaming: this essential part of our being of which we sometimes are not even conscious, yet it is the final offering of Grégoire Korganow in the exhibition he proposes, or in the book documenting it. This is the most delicate of the processes, especially given the formidable structures of imprisonment known to cut off and demolish human beings and their dreams, so he needed to build his own structure which could support dreams without squeezing them dry, allowing the prisoners to hold onto and remember their nightly escapes and communicate/ transmit them to the artist in the form of letters.
 

The trace and the aura of the carceral
 

Proche. (Close)

We understand the power of the title Korganow has chosen, showing us what and who is close to these carceral spaces, compelling us to contemplate that which Walter Benjamin and Patrick Boucheron explored, the former studying the city of Paris, the latter bringing us the life of Ambroise of Milan, a Bishop and founding figure of the Church: they bring us the Trace and the Aura of the carceral world. This is what Walter Benjamin said: “The trace is the appearance of something close, however far away that which left the trace is. The aura is the appearance of something far, no matter how close the thing is which evoked it. With the trace, we appear to grasp the object; with the aura, it would seem to be controlling us.”
 
When the barbed wire at Les Baumettes creates an ugly line cutting off the landscape of the city of Marseilles on the horizon, something perhaps evoking the Trace is shown to us, signifying the linear persistence of the carceral in the outside world; when, 150 meters from the jail in Le Mans, the buildings reveal in the twilight a number of colored doors all in a line, it is our mind -- and only our mind — which associates these aligned doors with the endless rows of cell doors in the halls of the prisons -- making it the Aura of the penitentiary, which becomes part of the porosity.
 
But if Korganow’s work reveals the power of the Aura, the stranglehold of the penitentiary worlds on that which is Close -- brings us to reflect on the carceral empire in our societies, it also restores something of the irrevocable nucleus of dreams and feelings which seep out, in the magnificent yet harsh portraits and the dreamscapes which he shares with us.
 
Working with these close elements undermines compartmentalization and reminds us that the process does not truly constrain the carceral system, which with the Aura goes well beyond the ordinary; working with the “close” means allowing the Trace to circulate between the Inside and the Outside, that which the detainees may experience in prison: emotions, dreams, hopes.
 

 

 

Christian Ingrao

CNRS/EHESS