Pulsions Urbaines 1962-2017. ARLES, LES RENCONTRES DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE 2017

Colección Leticia y Stanislas Poniatowski

Curated by Alexis Fabry & María Wills
Event: Pulsions Urbaines 1962-2017: L’Amérique Latine en mouvement
Places: Arles, Les Rencontres de la Photographie 2017, Espace Van Gogh
Date Arles: July 3rd – September 24th 2017
Exhibition and catalogue design: Olivier Andreotti (Toluca Studio)

The project Urban Impulses 1962-2017 is a visual essay about a city which finds sense in its own movement. The exhibition covers half a century of Latin American photography, and several hundred images chosen from the Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection. The perspective here looks to reconstruct the imaginaries of the cities on this continent in works carried out by the very photographers involved in the creation of the conflicted Latin American identity. The present exhibition displays the contradictions of a hybrid continent, between the pre-hispanic and post-colonial world, and the market society which inevitably takes hold of the processes which consolidate cities. We see here the transition from rural to urban, or better still, that way in which the rural and the popular coexist in the dreamed metropolis. These Urban Impulses project into the future. Chaos is at work in them as an emancipatory force, and on this path, nothing can wall it in, Latin America cannot be made a minority.
Alexis Fabry and María Wills

Catalogue:The works of more than 125 photographers and artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela express the contradictions of a region which, in its hybrid condition, finds itself torn between the pre-Hispanic world, the post-colonial experience, and the capitalist society that has implacably invaded the process of consolidation of its cities. The chapters are a series of imaginaries of urban transition, in which both rural and city people dream of the metropolis. “Cries” and “The Damned” are the most painful of all. “Open Nights,” “I Want to Be Me,” and “Local Color” express the Latino ethos, often stereotyped, of fiesta, disorder, vivid colors, and that ability to celebrate in the very midst of tragedy. Architecture, the concrete ruins, tells the story of the expansion of Latin American cities on their “Living walls”, in their “Urban geometries,” where modernism, kitsch, and the vernacular mix.

Drawn from the collection of Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski, the exhibition is shown at l’Espace Van Gogh in Arles during Les Rencontres de la Photographie 2017. It is co-curated by Alexis Fabry and María Wills, and is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Toluca Editions.

Catalogue description:

Toluca Éditions + Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles
Hardcover
528 pages – 24 x 30 cm
632 images
Bilingual edition : French and English
ISBN: 978-2-9522442-9-9

July 2017

Graphic design: Olivier Andreotti