Open calls
Every two years, we issue a call for projects that leads to the publication of a collective book, giving all photographers and writers the opportunity to publish. The aim of these calls for projects is to build a book around a subject that we believe is at the heart of contemporary issues. We are always on the lookout for authors willing to entrust us with their lines and eyes.
Musée Immédiat
The first issue of Essarter Éditions will echo that of our past productions, bouncing on the text ‘Weak Hegemon’ by Larion Lozovoy published as an appendix to L’Ukraine Post-EuroMaïdan[…] This text redefines, in a critical percussive way the role the museum plays in a political context. Our first issue will consider the phenomenon of “immediate incorporation into the museum”, the conversion of a mere object to the artefact considered worthy of the museum context. This phenomenon spans from place to place, museums, monuments, objects and so on. Transformed into an “exhibit”, a “relic” or a “temple” of the official memory, they become instruments of power to shape the history of a country. Starting with one question: what is history? Is it a chronology? A combination of events? Is it the people? A heritage? Newspapers? Books? History is not a universal truth, history is a subjective interpretation of contemporary or past events. In other words, history is a sort of individual truth in which everyone has their own ideas. One cannot rewrite history, but it is easy to select, abridge, retain or throw elements into the background of contexts. Constructing commemorative objects in public spaces, museums, monuments, street/place names, have become the way to create both temporal and permanent markers of the ideo- logy of a nation. These temporal markers make up a chronology, a study of time, the memory that each society wishes to safeguard and exploit to benefit its’ interests. Just as writer Svetlana Alexievich* found her own way of exposing history, showing the importance, even danger of the written and recorded testimony when it provides a stage to the witness of subjects it covers. This project is an invitation to self-appropriate the concept of history, through the historical forms of images and writing