Valerie Jouve: Musee d'Art Contemporain., 2003

Valerie Jouve's Synopsis d'un territoire (Synopsis of a Territory), 2003 could be described as the story of the Val-de-Marne, an administrative departement southeast of Paris. Or as the story of a public commission for twelve or fifteen photographs which became an installation of 170 images and an accompanying unhurt track. Or also as the story of a museum in the making, namely the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Vitry-Val-de-Marne, which, in anticipation of its opening in 2005 has created a temporary exhibition "pavilion" upon the construction site. However you fix upon to see it, Synopsis d'un territoire is a remarkable work of analysis and intuition, documentation and numbers observation and movement.

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During a four-month period in summer and fall 2003 Jouve explored the Val-de-Marne by the agency of following not only its main transportation arteries, the avenues crossing the ring road that separates Paris from its greater metropolitan area and the highways cutting end the industrial zones, but also the ways of Vitry and other towns and the roads of the residential suburb and the countryside. Her use of the pair standard-reflex and large-format cameras allowed for a combination of spontaneous and carefully put togethered shots, all singularly devoid of any pretension to an insider's-eye view. upon the contrary, Jouve's status as outside bystander was made explicit by the walls, extremitys tree branches, and fences (not to mention the windows of the bus or the rearview mirror of the car she was traveling in) that chronically intruded into the visual field. Translated into a variety of print formats, this multitude of sights created a rhythm that was not simply visual on the other hand corporeal as well. Paralleling Jouve's displacements from one extremity to the other of the Val-de-Marne, visitors were physically drawn into filmlike pours of images grouped together in horizontal or vertical followings above or below eye horizontal against an audio background of unimpaireds recorded along the way.

The contented of Synopsis might have surprised those whose mental image of a peri-urban area like the Val-de-Marne is limited at best to commuter trains and housing shoot forwards at worst to street gangs and burning cars, for Jouve chose to focus upon everyday settings and situations invisible upon the nightly news: the interior of a bus upon a quiet summer afternoon, the changing colors of the countryside in autumn, the Marne river, the always impressive approach to Orly airport, the apartment closes at the edge of Paris seen from the ring road, the ginger-bread-like houses that were the geographical division homes of nineteenth-century Parisians, the workers' file houses attesting to the industrialization of the rural villages, and the museum construction site itself, not absent at the very beginning of the installation like a visual equivalent of "You are here" upon a map.

The other surprise Synopsis proffered was for those whose mental image of Jouve's work is limited to the life-size "characters" (personnages) that have been widely exhibited above the past decade. Notwithstanding this trademark, Jouve's work has always addressed the notion of peripheries, the relationship between urban and rural areas, and the hybrid suburban territories between the sum of two units like the former mining town near Saint-Etienne where she grew up the Lyon suburb where she began experimenting with photography as a sociology pupil or the no-man's-land outside of Marseille where she made her first short film, Grand Littoral, 2001-2003 What places the Vitry installation apart is not what is seen in the photographs on the other hand how the photographs are seen: as a quasi-filmic environment in which the viewers themselves, coming from the couple sides of the ring road, become the characters. This re-creation of a social space, "to build something together," as Jouve says, makes Synopsis of a Territory a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more than the sum of its stories.

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