COMMUNITY MIXER

Filter Photo Members and friends are invited to join us for a special community mixer hosted at Hana Pietri Gallery, in conjunction with their current exhibition, A Breathtaking by French artist Julien Chatelin. Chatelin will discuss his works on view which explore the tension between stillness and movement, the visible and the invisible, the vast and the intimate, capturing the fractured realities of contemporary society. Following his remarks, there will be time for Q&A, as well as a special projection in the gallery's garden (weather permitting). Don't miss this opportunity to connect with fellow members of our vibrant Chicago photography community.

A Breathtaking

In 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring revolutions, I left Cairo and headed north through the desert road in direction of the Libyan border. In contrast to the tumult and political upheaval animating Tahrir Square, the villages, highways, mosques, and homes that unfolded before me appeared virtually abandoned, leaving a trail of ghost towns across an already semi-barren landscape. The architecture and the aesthetic logic that defined these communities were striking: a forest of lampposts, a mosque shaped like a spaceship, wide four-lane highways that rarely saw a single car, a luminous sign in the horizon with these words: A Breathtaking… 

Over the course of the next year, I traveled more than five thousand miles across the Egyptian desert, among the inhabitants of a landscape trapped in a state of transition. These communities were neither fully populated, nor completely abandoned. They were modern day mirages of economic progress and development, trapped in a tension between the emptiness of the desert and the shells of a modern city, between the promise of economic development and its failure to materialize.    

Semi-deserted landscapes carry a profound ambivalence, suggesting at the same time fecundity and sterility, a promise and nothingness. The topographies of these areas are charged with opposite energies, where plays a battle between cities and nature, man and its environment. In a quest to materialize what characterizes visually these places I pursued this essay in emblematical territories such as the ravaged city of Detroit, the Siberian city of Norilsk, and through provinces of western china impacted by high-speed urbanization.

—Julien Chatelin