Borders. Photography by Jean-Michel André. Text by Wilfried N’Sondé

24 × 32 cm 110 pages 62 color illustrations hardback, 3 booklet, loose sheets bilingual french/english edition june 2021 retail price: 39 €

For over ten years, Jean-Michel André has pursued photography at the crossroads between documentary forms and visual art. His approach is based on a political and poetical vision of the territory. www.jm-andre.com

Wilfried N’Sondé’s work is published by Actes Sud. His last novel, Un océan, deux mers, trois continents (2018) was awarded a number of prizes including the France Bleu/Page des libraires prize, the bfmtv/ Express magazine readers’ prize, the Mans book fair prize, the Paris Region high school prize, the uiad du Dauphiné literary prize, the Cherbourg book prize, the Algue d’or prize and the La Bastide prize.

Photography by Jean-Michel André Text by Wilfried N’Sondé

The story began in the jungle of Calais on the eve of the evacuation of a migrant camp in 2016. Jean-Michel André pursued the project over three years in France, Italy, Spain and Tunisia - anywhere there were refugees in search of shelter, anywhere there were men, women and children brought together by the same hope of crossing one final stretch of water. In May 2018, he met the writer Wilfried N’Sondé at an exhibition of his work at the French Institute in Tunis. Reflections on marginality, people caught inside their pasts, exile and the relationship to the other are key themes in N’Sondé’s novels. Together the photographer and writer decided to combine their disciplines. Borders is neither a linear series nor narrative – rather a collection of works. Borders n’est pas une série linéaire, ni tout à fait un récit : il s’agit plutôt d’un recueil. Jean-Michel André photographs places to reveal their shadow and their inherent sense of passage, building fragile borders between the real and imaginary, memory and the present. Time seems to float and spaces are shrouded in uncertainty. By never identifying locations, the photographer erases the map and thereby removes any narrow documentary interpretations of his work to create a more universal dimension. Nor does the artist date his photographs to avoid instant chronological identification, thus retaining but a narrow thread between memory, oblivion and projection. Building borders within the work would go against its intentions as the collection forms a continuity. Borders divide and kill. By creating a tension between fragments of landscapes, portraits and texts, Jean-Michel André and Wilfried N’Sondé create a poetic universe in which we feel the weight of gravity and the terrifying emptiness below. The project invites us on a journey, a journey of exile, fleeting passage, hope and resistance. Jean-Michel André and Wilfried N’Sondé’s works ask questions of the relationship to the other beyond real and imaginary borders. Both engage body, mind and soul with their subject to create a long-lasting and moving vestige of one of the tragedy’s of contemporary history.

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