Olivier Amsellem

The series titled La Poétique du bord [Poetics of the edge] reveals challenges which run through Olivier Amsellem's artwork. Made up of a set of photographs taken on the coast of the Bouches du Rhône, this emerges from the photos and broaches the subject of the sea's edge through the question of the conquest of a territory, limits, and upheavals in landscapes and urban developments. Transitoriness, metamorphosis, instability, as well as symbiosis and disappearance... these are all words which might cursorily describe this living praxis of photography. Olivier Amsellem's works, which are almost completely devoid of any human presence, nevertheless express movement, they show changing landscapes which more or less cleverly come to terms with architectures (and vice versa). This is a modest and ambitious history which is gradually written with photographs, a history made up of prestigious buildings and abandoned places, debris and nature parks, reverting to what, through successive experiences, fashions the environment, and to what, through capillarity, fashions the way we look at things.