CRUCIS
I grow up in a little village in the south west of France. Near the family house, at the crossing of country roads, stood an immense crucifix; architectural detail which becomes a symbol, a reference of my infancy.
Every springtime, I helped my grandmother to decorate with flowers this cross. At night, I went along with her at a procession where all the neighbours came singing prayers with the cure of the village. The district will be protected again bad luck and flail.
The tradition disappeared, the cross fell.
It became important for me to protect the picture of these crosses disseminated in the country.
For the story, these crosses were set by mission priests comen to start again the faith at the end of the XIX, beginning of the XX century.
Near these crosses, I collected different things.
Back to the studio, I worked forms of crosses with these treasures becomen objets of a visual cult.
By photographic alchemy, I transformed these symbols of my infancy, like a gift to memory.
“ All reality is double, is split between itself and its mirror image, between itself and what can be seen of itself in a mirror or, for example, by the through a photo.
This is why Hans Bellmer said: "an object identical to itself is without reality": such a " objet " would indeed be nothing but the pure inappearance of God or else one of those pure ghosts that are vampires and whose absence of reflections proves to positive spirits that they are only nothingness.
An actual without a virtual would not even be an actual.
Actuality and virtuality certainly differ from each other, but it is this difference that is constitutive of reality. There is not on one side a real model and on the other, separated from it, a virtual copy.
Photography is not an art of utopia, but of heterotopia.
To think is to think both; to photograph is to show both at the same time, based on their very difference.
This is what few photographers achieve who remain, basically, prisoners of the Platonic image of thought or of the mental geography inherent in theology.
But it is something that the rarest, the most creative, and among them, Caroline de Otero, who never captures or fixes the actual, but always the link between the actual and the virtual, the difference therefore of the object and its image or sometimes even the « objet » and its lack of image.
This is the case with his moving photos of object-symbols of Christianity, signs planted in the landscapes of the countryside and which hang from the void to their calm and disturbing serenity. »
Marcel Paquet, philosopher
