You call it a bordu. It’s well-observed. And it’s not illogical since you’re the one who took the photograph. Because everything begins with a photo, with a stroll along the edge of the bordu. Afterwards, thanks to technical magic, it turns into I don’t know how many thousands of photos, but it’s always the same landscape. And that is what I like, very much.
We are always on the edge of something: a river, a chasm, tears, madness, the grave. You, if I understand correctly, are first and foremost on the edge of a canal. Whether it is the Briare Canal rather than the Canal Saint-Martin changes nothing; it is a navigable path, this one dating back to the time when kings redefined the landscape by planting trees. And then the water flows there, not very fast, which is just as well; no one should forget that this image refers us back to the river (to the time) of old Heraclitus. It also goes without saying that it is a bit like you to make do with what is at hand.
A bordu is undoubtedly a bit more than an edge and a bit less than a border. If the border is what is found at the edge and extends alongside it, the bordu would be what is embedded right there. By the nature of things, it would also be the frontier or the fold where the photo articulates itself, as if in a mirror.
I said that in my eyes it was a matter of landscape. By that, I mean something essential, the paesaggio that I am myself, traversed by it and traversing it. Rarely have I felt such an immediate impression of knowing where I am while being absolutely lost, without landmarks, in the repetition of the same and in permanent difference, suspended between the material and the immaterial, placed on a small or large scale.
In a singular sense, one could speak of a symbolist opus, but with no mystery other than a surplus of reality. “Symbolon” was originally a sign of recognition, an object cut in two of which two hosts each kept a half that they passed on to their children, and whose two parts joined together allowed them to prove ancestral relations of hospitality; then, beyond that, it designated any sign of recognition. “Symbolê” means adjustment, fitting together, joint; I can’t help it, I fall once again upon the Shakespearean “out of joint,” time disoriented, so here, whatever the intention, an attempt to rejoin, to make the two halves of a whole meet as in a diptych—better yet, these two halves ready to fold over one another like the Tuscan shutters of old where martyrs and saints flourished.
There is a relative infinity here that sets itself in motion from next to nothing, a bit of grass or plank or concrete. From each image, one could imagine stories. The whole would eventually make one’s head spin. But ultimately, what I take away from it is its beauty. Yes, I insist, a beauty that touches me deeply, at once Neolithic and modern, which asserts itself—a beauty, why complicate life with other words.
Bernard Chambaz 2006
