JEAN-BAPTISTE GANNE

ÝMÇ

Jean-Baptiste Ganne was born in 1972, France, lives and works in Nice. He studied at Villa Arson, Nice and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2003-2004 and in Villa Medici in Rome until April 2007. With various modes of expression as photography, writing, performances, video and installations, the activities of Jean-Baptiste Ganne are articulated around the "representation of politics and the politic of representations". He illustrated Marx's Capital chapter by chapter (The Illustrated Capital, 1998-2003), he has been on strike (cooking) for six days during open studios in Rijksakademie (“The Cookist”, 2003) and decided to spread out his production budget converted to ten cents coins in Rome (“Senza Titolo” -All that Glitters is Gold- 2007). He exhibited with WHW in Zagreb (2001), published with Fotohof in Salzburg (2003), showed at Ellen de Bruijne Project in Amsterdam (2005 and 2006) and conceived 'El albergue holandès' at La Station in Nice (2006) as well as participating in many internationally renowned exhibitions.

The Illustrated Capital

“Jean-Baptiste Ganne’s series of photographs aim at illustrating chapter headings of the book one of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with documentary images of everyday life. His enterprise evokes both an ingenuous desire to see if Marx’s analysis of industrial society still holds true today, and the inevitable discrepancy between past and present, theory and reality. The result, The Illustrated Capital foregrounds the awkward relation between image and text: neither one quite lives up to the expectations aroused by the other. Images and words are put to the test, drained, as if to see how long they could carry on being meaningful”. (Sophie Berrebi)
Nowadays capital, as Debord demonstrates, reach such a level of accumulation, that it becomes an image by itself (The Society of the Spectacle, §34: “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image”). I am only recording this appearance of the capital becoming a spectacle. Photography has to be this hic et nunc representation of our society but with a small gap, a kind of irony. This project is a way to emphasise that any picture from a photo reporter is an illustration of Das Kapital.

El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha

In one of the shops at ÝMÇ will be read in Morse code with a red lamp, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha of Cervantes. The continuous reading of the integrality of the book will last one month and a half. This red-light reading is a monologous talk facing the world. But it is also a way to use the empty shop turned to an exhibition space as an amplifier. The white walls are only use for the reverberation of the light, and the windows open it to the mall. The shop becomes a tool for language instead of being a space to show or work. In this mall where people works, one of the shop will work on its own. 
Post Scriptum: And then, you may ask why the “Quijote” ? And Pierre Ménard (through Borges) would answer: “el Quijote, aclara Menard, me interesa profundamente, pero no me parece ¿cómo lo diré? inevitable…” / “Quijote, clarified Menard, interests me deeply, but does not seem to be, how shall I put, inevitable”.