From Tuesday 28 January 2020 - Exhibition until 21 February 2020. Opening on Tuesday, January 28 from 6:30 pm to 9 pm.

Galerie Umcebo - Safy et Cyrille VARET 102 Bd Diderot 75012 Paris, metro: Reuilly Diderot. Open from Thursday to Saturday from 14h to 19h.

Julia Dupont's photographs invite us to take a close look at the walls marked by the vegetation that has gradually been installed, traces of the passing of time. The artist has walked through an abandoned convent in Sintra, where ghosts, presences by light, guide us towards the out of focus of the image. Our gaze can then flee in spite of the walls that stop us.

This soft light caresses them and reveals the memory of those who lived in this isolated place. Through this photographic research, Julia Dupont has investigated the history of a territory, the country she comes from. Her images also convey a typology of a habitat.

They take us inside a building, which was once fenced off and which the artist opens up for us. Her photographs summon silence, recollection, attention and contemplation, a moment to think about the lives of the people who lived in community in this place now entrusted to nature.

Some of them are open to the outside, a wooded environment. Others offer a frontal point of view that suggests confinement and a desire for elsewhere.

Looking at the whole series, we prospect like the artist on a potential presence, as if the walls were speaking. From a cavity, a window, a door to the stone, we try to find the way. Julia Dupont offers us an interior journey and here reveals the rock, the starting point of the architecture. Poems, written after her shots, testify to sensations she has experienced, encounters that she keeps in her memory.

Pauline Lisowski