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Hélène Giannecchini
Fellow
2018 - 2019
Literature
Biography
Hélène Giannecchini was born in 1987 in Les Lilas, France, and currently lives and works in Paris. A writer and theorist, her approach blends literature, art history and aesthetics. In 2014, she published Une Image peut-être vraie with Editions du Seuil in the “La Librairie du XXI°siècle” collection, and in the same year directed the Alix Cléo Roubaud retrospective at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. For several years now, she has been developing a writing program in collaboration with contemporary artists.
A doctorate in literature and a specialist in the relationship between text and image, she has lectured at the Centre Pompidou, the Complutense University in Madrid, the University of Basel, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the Jeu de Paume, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and more.
Since 2017 she has been teaching contemporary art theory at the Ecole Européenne Supérieure de l’Image.
Project
His project for Villa Medici draws on the history of medicine and the work of the great anatomists who, by opening remains, have given us our contemporary bodies. At the crossroads of novel and essay, this book explores the anatomist’s gaze, which not only looks at the world but, by revealing it, engenders it.
about the artist
An image that may be true. Alix Cléo Roubaud
Afterword by Jacques Roubaud
Hélène Giannecchini
Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952-1983) lived a life of exceptional intensity. Photographer, writer, accomplice of her husband Jacques Roubaud, friend of filmmaker Jean Eustache, she left an intimate and profound body of work. In the thirty years since her sudden death, her photographs have been preserved and exhibited in major museums. But a whole part of her work as a writer remained forgotten. This book draws on over six hundred previously unpublished photographs – some fifty of which are reproduced here – and hundreds of letters and writings to shed light on the intimate life of Alix Cléo Roubaud and the strength of her conception of photography. Despite the importance of her archives, certain mysteries persist. Restoring this dazzling life, discovering these images, also raises the question of memory and its forgetting. Jacques Roubaud writes in his afterword: “This book does not ignore the autobiographical dimension of Alix Cléo Roubaud’s work, but it puts its importance into perspective. The chapter Hélène Giannecchini devotes to an in-depth study of one of her surviving photographs, Quinze minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration, is, I think, the most accomplished illustration of the richness of her approach.”
Publication date 02/05/2014
23.00 € incl. VAT
224 pages
published by the Editions du Seuil
ALIX CLÉO ROUBAUD.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Exhibition catalog
Edited by Anne Biroleau, Hélène Giannecchini and Dominique Versavel
” Working like a painter, elements of rhythm, density, essentially photographic repetition. The singular to be repeated to the point of dance, to the point of song. ” Alix Cléo Roubaud
Until 2009, Alix Cléo Roubaud’s work was almost entirely forgotten. Jacques Roubaud had the six hundred and fifty-two photographs left in a jumble after her death. These images have now joined the prestigious collections of various institutions (BnF, Musée national d’art moderne, Maison européenne de la photographie, etc.). The BnF has received two sets, constituting a collection of 148 unique prints. This book presents photographs from these different collections, in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the photographer’s work: a body of work that is both intimate, rooted in her biography – herself, her loved ones, her familiar objects, her medications, her addictions – and profoundly experimental. Alix Cléo saw the negative as ” the painter’s palette ” : once the desired print had been obtained, the negative was destroyed. As a result, very few prints exist, all of them in her own hand.
This book was published to coincide with the exhibition Alix Cléo Roubaud, photographs. “Fifteen minutes at night to the rhythm of breathing”. presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the François-Mitterrand site, Galerie 1, from October 28 2014 to February 1 2015, curated by Hélène Giannecchini.
- Broadcast LES NOUVELLES VAGUES on France Culture
with Hélène Giannecchini, photography historian and writer. In charge of the Alix Cléo Roubaud Photographer’s Fund, she has published An image that may be true. Alix Cléo Roubaud (Seuil, 2014) and was co-curator of the photographer’s retrospective organized at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France the same year.
Being Beauteous Amaury da Cunha, Marie Maurel de Maillé, Nicolas Comment, Anne-Lise Broyer
Léa Bismuth, Yannick Haenel, Etienne Hatt, Jean Deilhes, Hélène Giannecchini
“Anne-Lise Broyer, Nicolas Comment, Amaury da Cunha and Marie Maurel de Maillé decided to get together, to think about their images together, to arrange them as an organic whole. They have lived parallel or similar stories, despite the singularities they necessarily carry and the diversity of the routes they have taken. With Being Beauteous, they are trying to find a common photographic gesture. I see it as a way of reawakening a concept that has a long history and is far from obsolete: that of “community”. Following in the footsteps of Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, it’s time to renew the threads. But as soon as this word is uttered, we stumble: we stumble against the wall of the absence of community. We’re faced with the following question: if there is community, what do you defend? Do you think with one voice? Such questioning distracts us from the real issue, which is never that of reaching a truth -?and therefore the truth of the group or the collective?- but rather that of experimenting with possibilities.” […] Léa Bismuth
Éditions Filigranes
Published 2015
Hardcover
72 color and black and white photographs 120 pages
Published with the support of : Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon; Mairie de Saint-Florent-le-Vieil; Maison Julien Gracq; Musée de Guéret; L’Imagerie, Lannion; Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse
