Anne-Marie Proulx, Le Jardin d’après — Élisabeth Recurt

[Winter 2022]

Paris, Éditions Loco, 2021, 192 p.

By Élisabeth Recurt

[Excerpt]
Freely inspired by a novel by Anne Hébert,1 Anne-Marie Proulx’s photobook is composed of 125 black-and-white and colour photographs (taken on a 35 mm analogue camera and a cell phone), lines from plays (spoken by the protagonist of the novel, Flora Fontanges), and an excerpt from the novel itself, Premier jardin. The two books look the same (with the exception of the colour of the banner framing the respective cover pages). Le jardin d’après was previously presented as a photographic installation at L’Espace F in Matane in 2020.

Proulx is known for her creation of poetic worlds that explore our ambiguous connections with our environment, which predestined her for this interpretation of Hébert’s novel. The uncontrollable influx of memories washing over the character of Flora Fontanges when she returns to the city of her birth, which she had deliberately left years before, provokes an uneasy interplay between a search for clues and a denial of the past…

1 Le premier jardin (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988).

  
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 119 – CONTRE-NATURE ]
[ Complete article and more images, in digital version, available here: Anne-Marie Proulx, Le Jardin d’après — Élisabeth Recurt ]