For more than twenty years Anne-Marie Filaire has been building a body of work that is dense, engaged, rigorous, and monumental. Her first series, made in the 90s in her native region of Auvergne, opened her to the subject of landscapes, leading her on a long- term personal and photographic quest.

In 1999, she headed to the Near East and East Africa. Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Eritrea, and Yemen would be the terrain of her investigations for more than ten years. By moving through the most remote areas, she turns her gaze on the universal enormity of territories charged with history. Attentive to the scars and ravages of infinite time, she collects the signs searching for hints inscribed in the hollows. The missing images that she brings back call into question the possibility of representing un-representable spaces, borders, zones of contact and separation, between which she delivers the memory and the trace.

But how can we represent the reality of a landscape, when it is battered by the upheavals of interminable identity, territorial, and economic wars? How can we grasp the stigma of the past in the face of a contemporary history that is just being written?

Anne-Marie Filaire is not just an observer of the territories that concern her. Engaged in fieldwork, without ever backing away from the risks such an undertaking implies, she brings this experience to the limits of her intimate relationship with the landscape. Through the very act of taking the shot, the position and the rigor she imposes on her images, the perspective is constructed in all its severity and truth.

In this permanent movement between time and space, between history and the present, sounds an underlying violence. Far from the blinding moments of conflict, the distant horizons encounter the confinement of inextricable political situations.

Thus Anne-Marie Filaire offers us her own currency: that of the possibility of images, and with it a possibility of existence in invis- ible territories.

Fannie Escoulen Exhibition curator