“You should climb Mt. Olympus” suggested me a Greek friend as I was in Thessaloniki, in November 2015. I had come to Greece on a long standing project on landscape, but the weather made my original plan unfeasible. So this new project took its place. This chance discovery turned into a poetic promess. Six times I made the ascent of the mountain whose geographic reality I knew nothing about. Each time, I began to fuse with the elements. Images came out of this experience. Beyond any documentary logic, I combined them with other images taken during the same periode in order to establishe a game of secret echoes.
“(…) Earlier, Cordesse had worked as a war reporter, and even though he has left the battlefield far behind him, what has stayed with him from his initial training is a need to impose rules, for rules represent so many ways of dealing with the violence of the world without being destroyed by it. Olympus was a counterpoint, an unexpected way of responding to the tragedy of history by its reverse angle. Scaling Mt. Olympus was not an escape, but an act of freedom. (…)”
Pierre Wat, in ‘Olympus, scaling images ‘, 2018
Grants
・National Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts , FR
Collections
・Neuflize OBC ABN AMRO
・Nicéphore Niépce Museum, Chalon s/s Saône, FR