Sandrine Expilly, Insulaire

Saint-John Perse, whose real name was Alexis Leger, was born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1887. He settled in a place called "La Polynésie" on the Giens Peninsula in 1957. "I have just inhabited almost an absolute," he testified in a letter to Mina Curtiss, the American friend who gave him a villa facing the sea, "Les Vigneaux." Perse found there, as if in a dream, perfumes, a sky, an expanse that reminded him of the Caribbean island of his childhood, but he also gradually appropriated a light, a relief, a Mediterranean land that would become in part the poetic material of his last works.

Sandrine Expilly herself has an intimate knowledge of this place, which she has walked through many times since childhood:

"I know this piece of land in the extreme south of the Var almost by heart, it looks like a ship facing the open sea and takes me somewhere else each time. When I discovered the poetry of Saint-John Perse, I let myself be carried away by his words and his poetic breath. For several years I walked around the house where he had lived, tried to follow in his footsteps, guessed and imagined his steps on the peninsula. In this photographic series, I question the border between land and sea, between real and dreamlike landscapes. At the same time, I collect pieces of wood found along the coastal path, make different charcoals and I intervene on the documentary landscapes. I use the natural material of the place in order to leave my own mark in turn."

If Sandrine Expilly's photographic work invites us to happily rediscover the work of Saint-John Perse through sensation, it is far from assigning the poetry of Saint-John Perse to a single place. The artist manages, through her understanding of the work, to resonate with Persian poetics, which never ceases to praise the world in all its dimensions, to elevate this song to an absolute and to celebrate the elementary forces of life.

Sandrine Expilly is a graduate of Duperré Applied Arts School. She lives and works in Paris.

Archival documents from Maison Gallimard (original editions of works by Saint-John Perse, photographs, correspondence) will be presented on this occasion.