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Marie Quéau – « Odds and Ends » series
5 minDiscover a selection of photographs from the series Odds and ends by Marie Quéau, which is published by Area Books in January 2021, accompanied by the poem Le Chant de Lucie (Lucy’s Song) by Amélie Lucas-Gary. The book is the result of a study that started on 13 February 2013 at Châteauroux and which finished on 18 November 2018 in Kourou.
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2/12Beach, Brest, 2016, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
A beach in Brest considered like a planet (Mars the red one) where an era that is disappeared is engraved. Is this the bottom of the sea once it has completely evaporated? The strange colours send us back to painters’ visions of the start of the space age where it was the colour that constituted what was strange, extra-terrestrial.
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3/12Aircraft breakdown platform, Châteauroux, 2013, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
Laid like an egg on the tarmac, just after this airplane cockpit was dismantled it looks like it has just landed. Behind it the smashed up spare parts disrupt it lying there calmly.
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4/12Syctom company, Issy-les-Moulineaux, 2017, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
Taken in the Syctom company, the metropolitan household waste management agency, this photography can be interpreted several ways. Barricades installed in the streets to block the road during confrontations? The summit of a volcano? Furnace, fire of hell?
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5/12Wave, Atlantic, 2017, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
The ocean as the origin of life calms the fires that precede it. This wave speaks of the surface, and things that are buried.
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6/12Farming on burnt land, Cacao, 2017, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
Farming on burnt land is an agricultural system in which the fields are cleared by fire which enables a transfer of fertility. Beyond the technique at stake, this image also shows us a battle field that is still smoking, leaving the nature of the clash suspended.
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7/12Passive solar house, Cosswiller, 2014, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
This diamond shape in place and ready to take of is a passive solar house, a “heliodynamic architecture” concept by Eric Wasser. Close to a spaceship, it echoes other images from the series where habitat is designed as a box to shut yourself off from the outside.
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8/12Horizon, Pacific, 2017, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
Like a childlike representation, this image wants to offer an impossible photograph, that of space, its vastness, limitless.
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9/12Fire station, Colmar, 2016, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
A place where firefighters undergo training, this metal station can make us think of a home designed for extreme or extra-terrestrial places. This controlled fire is the opposite of farming fire on burnt land.
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10/12Deflection, Pacific, 2015, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
Taken at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, this image of an enlarged luminous artefact reminds us of the shape of the heliodome and recalls a trajectory, a journey through the night of space.
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11/12Vault of the Saint-Pierre-Le-Jeune parish, Strasbourg, 2016, from the ODDS AND ENDS series
At first glance we don't know if this simplified shape of the man is sinking into the ground or ascending towards the light. Close to the keyhole, the proportions of the head in relation to the body are strange.
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The Institut français and the artist
The series Odds and ends, by Marie Quéau, is published by Area Books in January 2021, accompanied by the poem Le Chant de Lucie (Lucy’s Song) by Amélie Lucas-Gary.
Marie Quéau was a winner of the Institut français Sur Mesure residencies in 2019 for her project 232.8°C carried out in Brazil. She wanted to document the fire at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, on September 2, 2018. The project aimed to connect catastrophe with its symptoms, and measure what the world had permanently lost. The succession of time-related disappearances and collisions temporelles was questioned.