In his all-new work, ATTRACTION, Christian Milovanoff indulges in a strange game with his own archives, reproducing, deconstructing and transforming them along purely photographic lines. For him, the mere fact of collecting his own world images or those of others is not enough. As Arlette Farge wrote (in A.Farge, Le goût de l'archive, Paris, Le Seuil, 1989, p.89): "Going back to the archives can be difficult: the physical pleasure of picking up the trace is followed by doubt, mingled with a sense of powerlessness at not knowing what to do with it.". For historians and artists alike, the question is how to impart meaning to this raw material.
Organising, sorting, indexing, choosing, cutting, classifying, mounting, juxtaposing, opposing, reconciling, fitting, allowing narrative to unfold, shaping, aligning, sequencing, deploying, switching, re-sizing, making connections, repeating, collapsing, spacing out, formulating, placing and re-placing, duplicating, glueing, enlarging and reducing.... It was out of such painstaking construction that Attraction came into being, the artist playing with images as with a deck of cards.
Christian Milovanoff has put his own twist on Jean-Luc Godard's words, «montage, mon beau souci » ("montage, my lovely worry"). His concern lay with making images resonate with one another and then recording the result. By superimposing them, he could see the cover and the reverse side of a page of newsprint simultaneously and then photograph the result. If the graft did not 'take', he would start over, this time with different light, different framing - or sometimes even abandon the operation.
Archiving, mounting and reproducing has enabled him to organise "seen things" and impose order on the chaos of the visible, which he achieves by means of narratives in which fiction echoes documentary, and fact, likewise, echoes fiction.
Pierre-Lin Renié
Exhibition presented for the Arles Encountings 2012 
