Radio Ballast

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Hardcover

104 pages, including an 8-page fold-out

90 colour photographs

223 x 263 mm

ISBN 9782365114592

English

Oct 2025

French-Ivorian photographer François-Xavier Gbré has developed an artistic practice that explores territories and revisits history. His work focuses particularly on the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. As part of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Latitudes programme, of which he is the first laureate, he chose to follow the railway line connecting Abidjan to Niger. Built in the former French West Africa (AOF), the line was once used to transport raw materials from Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Niger for extractive purposes, as well as to carry passengers. Today, it remains active but is reserved solely for freight. The small stations, typical of colonial modernist architecture, and certain sections of track have now been abandoned: the lush vegetation of the regions they pass through has gradually infiltrated them, invading waiting rooms, hangars, and dilapidated ballast beds.

For over a year, François-Xavier Gbré traveled along the railway line, photographing train cars, stations, maintenance workshops, and diverse landscapes. His images are imbued with a certain melancholy, reflecting on the passage of time and its effect on matter. As a counterpoint to the photographs of landscapes bathed in light and exuding the humidity of the earth, there is a series of images of fragments: surfaces peeled away by the passage of time or eaten away by rust... Little by little, an outdated atmosphere emerges from these places, a feeling of time standing still. The journey to which the photographer invites us speaks of a history that is certainly over, but whose echoes still resonate in areas long fragmented by colonial presence, whose imprint endures despite the vagaries of nature and man.

This series is accompanied by a text by Clément Chéroux, director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, an essay by Sandrine Colard, photography historian and professor at Rutgers University-Newark (United States), and an unpublished short story by writer Gauz'.

Born in Lille in 1978, François-Xavier Gbré lives and works between Ivory Coast and France. His work questions colonial vestiges and social change. His exploratory practice approaches photography as a medium for weaving a dialogue between context, environment, and memory. Represented by Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, his work has been exhibited in France and internationally, notably at the Venice Biennale in 2024 and at Tate Modern in London in 2023, and is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the FNAC – Fonds national d'art contemporain, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. In 2020, François-Xavier Gbré won the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles. In 2024, he was the first winner of the Latitudes programme of the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès.