Walid Ben Ghezala Chambre(s) Noire(S)

Décembre 2020 I Janvier 2021 La Boîte I Un lieu d’art contemporain

Like a final gesture, the scene is always set in a time that is difficult to anticipate. It would be the time of a return, or of a slightly longer than usual halt, but one that nonetheless leaves the impression of an abolition of the day. At this point, Walid Ben Ghezala can’t rule out the possibility that a certain tiredness will take hold of him and that exhaustion will overtake his steps. What if an opening were to appear with nothing firm underfoot? For that to happen, he would have to withdraw from his availability what little there is still to take from it, and agree to photograph only at night sometimes.
Alone among other solitudes, ghosts or flatmates, he finds himself between four walls for a few hours of nocturnal respite: a room, his own, neither too large nor too small, which he returns to with heavy steps, exhausted under the steamroller of work and days, barely standing or flattened under the blasé demands of routine. The photographs he takes are not, however, the kind you might see in young people looking for a room of their own. The only thing we can be fairly sure of is that Walid Ben Ghezala’s approach actually accomplishes something quite different from a tour of the house. Without any particular protocol, but not without constraints either, he proceeds by varying his system slightly. Under the mechanical eye of his film camera, he alternates between openness and half-tone, purity and failure, spontaneous or constructed shots, frontal or oblique, distant or close, depending on the circumstances. But here’s the thing: he’s no more a camera obscura observer than he is a snapshot taker of sensations, impressions and bits of necessarily subjective perceptions. His photographic practice works without worrying about decoying reality. But it is the other side of the coin that he brings to light. Of course, the eye, our own eye, is invited in, all the more so because each shot, long before it is taken and becomes an image, begins in its own way a possible narrative. But it is not in the marks of a passage or an occupation that it should be sought.
Looking at Ben Ghezala’s photographs, we are a long way from the disorder that runs through order; a long way even from the comfortable decor of a ‘home’. These images speak to us of a solitude that is coveted and kept at a distance. But if they seem to say many things, the narrative possibilities they offer promise nothing in advance. This is no doubt not because an articulated narrative would be too complicated, but because the cliché reinvents another way of grasping intimacy by its troubling side at the touch of a finger. It’s clear that Walid Ben Ghezala has made first-person photography his credo, but without the drama. In photography, as we know, it’s not so much the subject that counts as the way in which things are said, revealed or hidden. Here, the image is taken without necessarily having a story in sight; unless it is a fiction that has gone astray, if it were not to postpone the day of awakening from one night to the next. The arrangement, made up of jumps and nothings, was imposed after the fact. And if, in its discontinuity, it borrows from the diary, it is not so much because it adopts the form of the diary as because part of the orbiting of the images follows the continuity of a piece of writing while accepting improbable connections on either side of a breath. Between the recurrence of certain gestures or frames in so many open parentheses, and the way in which each of these images fits into its proper place, there is nothing to prevent the eye from gliding blindly along. It’s like a dark room, or almost. So let’s enter, in silence.
Excerpt from the text by Adnen Jdey

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