ARTIST STATEMENT
Capnomancy
feminine name, divination from the study of smoke, its shapes and colors
I had in mind a sentence from Ernest Renan “ what we say about ourselves is always poetry », and I returned to walking in the leaves, among the century-old trees.
After my series Chimera, I felt that I still had to explore in this forest.
As if it were the place of meeting with oneself, a place of transition to another state.
In the tales, the forest presents itself as a space where perceptions merge, revealing certain hidden dimensions of time and consciousness.
It seemed obvious that it would once again be my experimental chamber, my infinite workshop.
This series would be a story told from memories.
Your story, my story, our story.
I offered each person a journey into the intimacy of their memory, to conquer an immense, unique, precious memory.
They came, facing my lens, to offer me the memory of a moment and I saw the ghosts of the past, the illusions of the future reform before me, through the ephemeral smoke.
Its a story. A story that speaks of childhood, origin, solitude, travel, borders, dreams, marriage, birth, infinity, absence, death,…
It's a great story. The story of life.
Linda Tuloup
POINT OF VIEW
The gaze of Yannick Haenel, writer
Something jumped out at me the first time I saw a photograph of Linda Tuloup hanging on a wall (was it in a gallery or an apartment, whatever): it is the question of the clearing.
Desire, it seems, would be obscure; in her, on the contrary, it possesses an evidence which illuminates her at the heart of her own clarity. The clearing is the other name of the thinning.
In Linda Tuloup's photographs, there is a forest that opens up; nudity is placed there, in the clearing of the clearing, and the veils which are stretched between the trees and the bodies (fabrics, smoke, masks) repeat the immemorial history of the desire which is offered by concealing itself.
It's an original scene, and it's pretty crazy to see it take place today, with black and white dullness, as if we were in the afternoon of the world. I say afternoon, and not morning, because it seems to me that the moment Linda Tuloup presses the shutter, the humans have already been kicked out of paradise, the separation has taken place, we are after, in a suspended breath.
It seems to me that in this photographic world the sexual difference is really at work: it blurs both the relationships and clarifies them: there are no men in her photos.
The forest is feminine, full of reflections, with a woman who photographs (who watches, hunts, desires) and a woman who is photographed (sometimes it is the same). This feminine world, populated by animals, is violently addressed to men.
And then I like that in Linda Tuloup's photographs desire is not linked to death. Finding this place where you want without dying is my quest.
Here, I turn around this scene in my books, I think all the time about the nudity of the women and the glance on them of the men. I write to adjust this look - to make it fair. To see better too. To love better. So the world of Linda Tuloup attracted me; write no on but with his photographs seemed obvious to me. In my turn, thanks to them, I became crystal clear.
Linda Tuloup showed me a series of images, and I saw a path that was invented between them, a path that led to the clearing. I let myself be invited, the sentences were written like this, through the play of attraction. I wrote a little erotic story, the story of a man who prowls on the edge of the woods, and who enters to see better.
Yannick Haenel
The look of Benoit Rivero, photo editor at Acte Sud
Self-portrait: it was Hippolyte Bayard who started. In 1840, mortified at not having been recognized as the inventor of photography, he chose to represent himself as a drowned man and post mortem his false suicide. Does he know then that through this inaugural device, through this truly brilliant staging, he will for a long time install photography in the referential register that will mark his entire history: relation to truth, relation to identity, relation to death?
Even more disturbing, this precocious Self-portrait drowned is already naked.
One hundred and seventy years later, the pink room by Linda Tuloup subtly assigns the same autofictional charge to the darkroom. Offer the self-image that is offered.
Full life icon versus false death image. Bare truth. Who operates? Who is watching ? And that word that simply says "Wait".
The pink room of Linda Tuloup
All the rooms are the same, but this one is pink, like a big theater, a brothel of words and desires. All the rooms are the same, but this one is constantly crossed by a knife of light. This pink room where Linda Tuloup takes us, this room, this song, with windows on the body.
After what storm, after what shipwreck, do we arrive, spectators of these exhausted, stranded bodies, rolling, unrolling in the slow undulations of the sheets?
All the rooms look the same, all the bodies come together. Linda Tuloup, through her words – “come”, “now”, “you’re crazy”… – evokes presences, but never shows the Other: lovers, like all men, are ghosts. Perhaps they are away, off on a crusade, smoking a cigarette in the kitchen, on their way to their wife’s home?
It’s a pink room, a hotel room, a room for life; a room to write in, a room of tears to leave and meet again, a room where the sheets sometimes freeze, sometimes tear and burn.
Hervé Baudat
Chimera by Linda Tuloup
Through mist and bursts of dawn the flesh of the animal soul advances.
Here comes the kingdom of witchcraft. Photography before being a mechanism is an alchemy: living, moving matter, plays of masks and mirrors, fusions and putrefactions. If alone on earth, we are bored in our cities and countryside: the forests are without mysteries, we can no longer have our throats cut by bandits, devoured by hyenas and infernal spirits. In the games of illusions and mirages, lost paths and waking dreams, Linda Tuloup, through her incantations and bad spells, reveals and imposes a divine, feline, feminine reality on our daily lives. The Chimeras are as many promises of destruction as of happiness, fire and bonfires. They remind us of that time when gods, men, animals rubbed shoulders, united, copulated, conspired, gave birth. The song of the snakes has stopped, we have clothes but little magic. The goddesses are in the museum and nudity has never been common in the streets, under penalty of being taken away. Perhaps to watch these apparitions one must build a temple, prostrate oneself, tremble, offer as sacrifice bad friends and shoddy romances? In the whirlwind of seasons where the Chimeras lead us? Was their resurrection desirable?
Hervé Baudat