[Winter 2022]

Errance Sans Retour, “They also killed my father”
By Pierre Dessureault

“We are not in front of the images; we are in the middle of them. Like they are in the middle of us. The question is how we circulate among them, how we make them circulate.” The life of images, constantly relaunched in various presentation contexts, is core to Renaud Philippe’s humanist work on what is currently happening with the Rohingyas of Myanmar, both in his photojournalistic pieces, which appear in many dailies, and in his participation in the film Errance sans retour by Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins and in the exhibition of the same name organized at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ). First, his photo report on the Rohingyas, refugees forced into exile in Bangladesh due to the religious persecution that they suffer in their home country, paints a complex portrait that synthesizes the question through his consequential application of photographs and words. Then, the film plunges viewers into daily life in the camp where these uprooted people are crowded together, featuring a diversity of narrations by flesh-and-blood people, who, through what they say about their experiences and their gestures captured within the moving images over time, disrupt the opinions of the orthodoxy. By establishing a community of heterogeneous images in which Philippe’s photographs and filmed images cohabit with children’s drawings, oral accounts, artefacts, a sound environment, and a diorama by the artist Karine Giboulo, the exhibition creates a space that opens time for reflection and triggers a process that submits certainties to the scrutiny of critical judgment and debate.

For more than fifteen years, Philippe has produced photo reports on current events in Sudan, Haiti, India, Nepal, Thailand, Kenya, Pakistan, and Canada. The constant in this documentary work is the fate of human beings placed by history in extreme conditions. It is not natural catastrophes or political conflicts in themselves that interest him but the collective tragedies that these events engender. Following the same principle as for his other reports, in which famil­iarity with the subject and field research are essential, Philippe spent three weeks in the Kutupalong camp, in Bangladesh, in January 2018. The camp, which, with an area of thirteen square kilometres, is the largest in the world, contains seven hundred thousand exiled Rohingyas living in utter destitution. Le Devoir and The Globe and Mail have published his photographs. In Le Devoir, they are introduced by an article by Sarah R. Champagne, who describes the history of the situation. Detailed captions accompany each of the thirteen photographs, and also included is an interview with Philippe, who explains his approach. The Globe and Mail put online a major audiovisual presentation with a series of photographs and an essay by Michelle Zilio.

This treatment and method of dissemination of current events can be traced back to the tradition of illustrated magazines that arose in Germany, France, and the United States in the 1930s. At the time, information transmitted through photographs, which were seen as infallible and bearing universal truths, was far from being as widespread as it is today, when images proliferate instantly on a multitude of platforms. According to the program elucidated by Henry Luce in the prospectus announcing the creation in 1936 of Life – which for a long time defined the genre and influenced all photographic practices – it was for the photographer “to see life, to see the world, to eyewitness great events” and for the reader “to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.”

In Le Devoir and The Globe and Mail, the relationships between the authors’ words and Philippe’s images, composing the scaffolding of the photo essay, construct an entity that gives meaning to current events. In this structure, it is not enough for images to provide vi­sual proof reinforced by words; they must establish a set of relationships that complexify the information gathered in the field and shed light on the events that they show. In this regard, the photojournalist, from his own point of view, turns himself into the chronicler of events, ordering them in a form in which the visual and the written establish a narrative in which, in terms of history, a single image is no longer only the bearer of reality but the cornerstone of an edifice that corroborates and pinpoints its meaning.

Higgins and Carrier’s film Errance sans retour, excerpts of which were included in the exhibition, made use of the research conducted by Philippe, who also acted as camera operator and assistant direc­tor. It is an investigatory film, unique in approach, that dives deep into life in the camp. During long sequences, the camera, static, follows the successions of daily movements and observes the bus­tling reality without ever changing its course or circumscribing it to a preconceived formula. It’s a film of listening, as attentively as possible, to individuals’ voices. Usually framed in close-up, the faces of witnesses take up the entire screen. Their words, communicating a unique lived reality, establish a proximity that meets the gaze, like that between two people who are face to face. Quite simply. It is an unadorned film, without aesthetic effects that would give precedence to the personal vision of the filmmaker to the detriment of the intense encounter between two people having a moment of exchange, equal to equal.

This approach, made of slowness, simplicity, and perseverance, allowing the thickness – and sometimes the impenetrability – of reality to be revealed, recalls that of Raymond Depardon, who set out to listen to his subjects. It also fits within the lineage of films that the French-Cambodian director Rithy Panh made starting from his own experience in the work camps. In a note about his documentary S21, la machine de mort khmère rouge, Panh seems to presage the approach of the makers of Errance sans retour: “I have never envisaged a film as a response or a demonstration. I think of it as a questioning.”

Such questioning places spectators before the mystery of the images and leaves them to decode their enigmas. This is completely contrary to the media amplification, considerably reinforced by dramatic effects and short cuts, that reduces events to a few spectacular elements to give them maximum impact and provoke a wave of fleeting emotions. It is an approach that stands in opposition to the reductive and dogmatic positions of ideologies and claims to victimhood that are resistant to nuance and dialogue.

Philippe’s photographs and the excerpts from Higgins and Carrier’s film form the backbone of the exhibition, which occupies the cells of a former prison, now the MNBAQ’s Pavillon Charles-Baillargé. It would be more correct to call this immersive, diversified presentation an installation. Unlike a classic exhibition, which presents a series of pieces that gravitate around a single theme and state personal and singular visions, the installation creates a space with multiple entries, inhabited by images; it also brings together the intersecting gazes of practitioners to produce a common statement that engages spectators in an experience in which they become the protagonist in the story that surrounds them.

Whereas the documentary images are the outcome of the photographer’s process of information gathering in the field, the installation results from second-order work: the images become raw material deployed within the space created by a perceptual appa­ratus and are confronted with data provided by other kinds of information. The resulting whole sketches out tangible configurations that cross disciplinary frontiers. Thus, the photographs lining the walls of the first cell of the exhibition are delivered in bulk, in an immense mosaic, without the hierarchy that would define a point of view and affirm a personal vision of the subject or the essay, which makes the uniqueness of the images its foundation. This accumulation, which does not offer the solution of continuity, multiplies perspectives on the subject, breaks the unity of vision, and chal­lenges the authority of the singular, immutable image that peremptorily states the reality of things. The arbitrary cohabitation of words, sounds, and drawings drowns out the significant detail that would isolate and highlight the photographs, placing them instead in a sensitively interwoven fabric that spectators will interpret in their own way.

Here and there, sprinkled throughout this discontinuous path, Philippe’s photographs, presented traditionally, and videos are posi­tioned as pauses and ruptures in an itinerary that, though marked out by the artists, remains completely open to the viewer, who is released from his or her passive position as simple voyeur of the miseries of the world. Thus, the viewer’s entire body is engaged in a path during which the gaze moves through the space-time of the installation and weaves connections that ravel and unravel in the instant between the heterogeneous components. The stories that viewers compose match their movements to the reality of images that bring forth the intense presence of faces, the precariousness of the living conditions, and the incessant humming of the daily activities in the camp that saturates the space of the exhibition. Thus, the sensory experience of a continuum inhabited by an abundance of visual and audio documents that play on the proximity of the emotions that they engender, on the memories that they unearth, and on the distance of the reflection that they elicit becomes an integral aspect of how the installation surfaces meaning that is not monolithic but moving and dependent on each viewer’s thoughts.

In this regard, the environment of one of the cells is articulated around an excerpt from the film showing a boy in close-up. With composure, he describes one of his drawings and details, with all the clinical precision of a still-vivid memory, the massacre that he witnessed in his village. Until he makes an unsparing observation: “The leaf was too small, I couldn’t draw everything.” The following montage shows, still in close-up, women who were victims of violence. Then, we return to the boy, who concludes, “They also killed my father.” During the long moment of silence that follows, he calls upon us to witness through his gaze fixed straight into the lens. A cut to black completes the sequence. At the museum, his drawing is displayed in the centre of the following dark cell, accompanied by other drawings that, after the preceding testimonials, leave little to the imagination.

Arranged facing the cells, as links between the six spaces occupied by the installation, groups of small characters evoke the refugees’ journey to exile and lead visitors toward Giboulo’s diorama, which occupies the entire space of the final cell. Her reconstruction of the camp with figurines and various material, bears the marks of her handiwork that shaped the objects, gave them form in the same way that the children’s drawings match their gestures. The diorama acts in contrast with the other components of the installation and their technical apparatuses of image production. Giboulo’s reconstruction, reflected infinitely by a series of mirrors, echoes a pano­ramic view of the camp positioned as a preamble to the exhibition. This image delimits the reality of the place in eight prints, which overlap each other like so many fragments of an elusive and fleeting reality from all sides. The loop is closed. What remains are thoughts and questions with no response.   Translated by Käthe Roth

Pierre Dessureault is an expert on Quebec and Canadian photography. He has organized more than fifty exhibitions and has published books and articles on the subject.

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 119 – AGAINST NATURE ]