Etienne Chosson’s Place de la République & Université Paris 8, avril-juin 2016 is a group of seven analogue and one digital color photographs together with a photograph of a text mounted as a notebook.  They were shot on République square at the time of it’s occupation at spring 2016, and in an occupied room of Paris 8 university’s philosophy department. Those occupations occurred within the context of the « Nuit Debout » movement, born as a result of the strikes against reforms to labor regulations denounced as a step backward regarding employee rights for the benefice of large companies. By reviewing Place de la République & Université Paris 8, avril-juin 2016, we can observe the installation of a big tent, some speaker on a tree, a current transformer, the press commission tent, an information carton, Tv Debout ‘s webcam as well as a tarpaulin deployment. This treasure hunt indicates us the project’s ambition to look after a legitimate position, form the inside and the outside, and it also tells us something about the way the photographer himself occupy and construct the space. Etienne Chosson doesn’t literally occupy the exhibition space but he directly refers to the process of using space in the political and popular environments. With the photographic reproduction of the text, initially xeroxed and taped on a Paris 8’s wall, we find a new clue, « La grève véritable transfigure l’espace » (The real strike transfigures space). Etienne Chosson’s project is part of the continuation but also in the break with the idea of the photographer’s role, in an artistic distribution network, to be in an anti-journalistic approach, in other words to produce alternative information as soft powers. This new work allows us to observe his involvement into documentary medias also in relation to the field of writing, and his profound interest for the representations of occupation politics.

Etienne Chosson (* Paris, 1987, lives and works in Geneva). The forms he produces are his way of rooting an action in contemporary territory. We are talking about struggles for the occupation of the land, autonomy, resistance and organization. Etienne Chosson composes various information streams, for example: Performing a general assembly scene from a militant film, or turning his interviews with asylum seekers, starting with a reading of a text entitled La fiction juridique de l’asile. His photographic processes testify with subtlety to a material reality, made up of multiple temporalities, visible or hidden elements. Via the photograph of a banner designed to conceal the faces of those who wear it. Or by that of a hand, stretching a wax ammunition filled with paint, in front of a group of zadists with faces effaced by the depth of fields. A graduate of HEAD-Geneva in 2015, his work was recently exhibited as part of the New Heads 2015 Awards; Bourses Déliées of the Cantonal Fund of Contemporary Art of the city of Geneva, 2017 or the Swiss Institute of Rome, 2016.

Photography : Étienne Chosson, Place de la République & Université Paris 8, avril-juin 2016