French-Ivorian photographer François-Xavier Gbré has developed an artistic practice that explores territories and revisits history. His work focuses particularly on the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. As part of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Latitudes programme, of which he is the first laureate, he chose to follow the railway line connecting Abidjan to Niger. Built in the former French West Africa (AOF), the line was once used to transport raw materials from Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Niger for extractive purposes, as well as to carry passengers. Today, it remains active but is reserved solely for freight. The small stations, typical of colonial modernist architecture, and certain sections of track have now been abandoned: the lush vegetation of the regions they pass through has gradually infiltrated them, invading waiting rooms, hangars, and dilapidated ballast beds.
For over a year, François-Xavier Gbré traveled along the railway line, photographing train cars, stations, maintenance workshops, and diverse landscapes. His images are imbued with a certain melancholy, reflecting on the passage of time and its effect on matter. As a counterpoint to the photographs of landscapes bathed in light and exuding the humidity of the earth, there is a series of images of fragments: surfaces peeled away by the passage of time or eaten away by rust… Little by little, an outdated atmosphere emerges from these places, a feeling of time standing still. The journey to which the photographer invites us speaks of a history that is certainly over, but whose echoes still resonate in areas long fragmented by colonial presence, whose imprint endures despite the vagaries of nature and man.
This series is accompanied by a text by Clément Chéroux, director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, an essay by Sandrine Colard, photography historian and professor at Rutgers University-Newark (United States), and an unpublished short story by writer Gauz’.
