PORTRAITS
PERSONS
A PERSON
In ancient Hebrew, the singular form of the word face does not exist; everyone has many faces.
Erri De Luca
A person, in philosophical terms, refers to a real, sentient being with agency and consciousness. It feels it has a clear, more or less stable identity and a free will.
In the words of Oscar Wilde:
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.'
some portraits
Albert
Jean Claude Carrière 2016
Jean-Claude Carrière was a French writer, scriptwriter, lyricist, director and actor. Dividing his time between film, theatre and literature, and renowned for his adaptations for theatre, film and television, he frequently met with critical and public success. His work is colossal.
Patrick Chamoiseau 2018
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French writer from Martinique. The author of novels, short stories and essays, and a theorist of Creolité, he has also written for the theatre and cinema. He was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for his novel Texaco.
A friend of Édouard Glissant (Traité du Tout-monde, 1997), he is working with Glissant to develop the concept of mondialité, with a view to translating into political and poetic terms a new conception of the world based on the opening up of cultures and the protection of peoples' imaginary worlds, which are slowly disappearing under the standardising influence of globalisation.
André Compte Sponville
André Comte-Sponville, born in Paris on 12 March 1952, is a French philosopher. He came to public attention in 1995 with the publication of his seventh book, Petit Traité des grandes vertus. He attempts to reconcile the answers of traditional philosophers with today's questions. How to live? How to be happy’, “Does life have a meaning”, “How to find wisdom without submitting to religions”, “How to be free”, “Is virtue still possible”, “How far does tolerance go”. He is a philosopher who describes himself as a materialist, rationalist and humanist. He proposes a materialist metaphysics, a humanist ethic and a spirituality without God, presented as ‘wisdom for our time’.
Fred - New York
Fred Lanzenberg
Fred was a Parisian. When he arrived in Brussels in 1966, from the Galerie Rive Gauche in Le Sablon to the Galerie Fred Lanzenberg on Avenue Louise, and then to the Etangs d'Ixelles, Fred shared his passion for contemporary art with enthusiasm and clear-sightedness.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio 2018
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is a French-language writer, as he defines himself, of French and Mauritian nationality. He quickly achieved success with his first published novel, Le Procès-verbal (1963). Until the mid-1970s, his literary work was marked by the formal research of the Nouveau Roman. Thereafter, influenced by his family origins, his incessant travels and his marked taste for Amerindian cultures, Le Clézio published novels that made much of dream and myth (Désert and Le Chercheur d'or), as well as books of a more personal, autobiographical or family nature (L'Africain). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008 as ‘a writer of new beginnings, of poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the prevailing civilisation’.
Tobie Nathan 2017
Tobie Nathan (born Aïd Nathan in Cairo - when he became a naturalised French citizen, he chose the first name Théophile) is a French psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Paris-VIII and writer. He is one of the leading exponents of French ethnopsychiatry.
Léontine & Félix
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco was an Italian academic, philosopher, semiotician and writer. Known for his many academic essays on semiotics1, medieval aesthetics, mass communication, linguistics and philosophy, he is best known to the general public for his novels. After completing a doctorate at the University of Turin, he became Professor of Semiotics and then Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bologna, before becoming Emeritus Professor in 2008.
The notion of the ‘possible world’ developed by Eco stems from research into logic by Thomas Pavel and Teun A. van Dijk. Eco defines a possible world as ‘a state of affairs that is expressed by a set of propositions where, for each proposition, either “p” or “no” exists’. In other words, a possible world is made up of individuals who carry within them a set of properties that are not just static characteristics or personality traits, but can also be actions. Possible worlds depend on a narrative instance that creates unity and cohesion among the different elements of the possible world. Narration is capable of explaining the multiplicity of sensory and cognitive experiences through the use of fiction.
Gilbert & George
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore) are two British visual artists working as a couple. They live and work in London. They were awarded the Turner Prize in 1986, and represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
Edouard Glissant
Édouard Glissant was a French novelist, poet and philosopher. He won the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde. In 1992, Édouard Glissant was a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott won by one vote.
Édouard Glissant is the founder of the concepts of ‘antillanité’, ‘Tout-monde’ and ‘Relation’, among others. Glissant also rethinks the notion of creolisation, as well as the categories of metaphysics and the modalities of cultural dialogue, in the light of his relational prism. Best known for Le Discours antillais (1981), Édouard Glissant is the author of a colossal body of conceptual and literary work, and a dense bibliography. From Soleil de la conscience (1956) to Anthologie de la poésie du Tout-Monde (2010), he has worked in every genre, from novels and poetry to theatre and philosophical essays. Often classified as a postcolonial theorist, Glissant's thought cannot be reduced to a single school or current, and has always redefined the models of a vision of the world in search of its own movement.
‘A Distinguished Professor of French literature at the City University of New York (CUNY), Édouard Glissant was director of the Courrier de l'Unesco from 1981 to 1988 and Honorary President of the International Parliament of Writers in 1993. He spent most of his academic career in the United States, first at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, then in New York. In 2006, he founded the Institut du Tout-Monde in Paris.
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter, born on 15 February 1945 in New York, is an American scientist and academic, best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: Strands of an Eternal Garland (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1980.
Jean-Yves Jouannais
As a teenager, Jean-Yves Jouannais founded the Revue perpendiculaire.
The group moved to Paris, where Jean-Yves Jouannais became editor-in-chief of the magazine Art Press.
He is the author of several essays, novels and collective works.
Artistes sans œuvres: I would prefer not to, Éditions Hazan, 1997
Des nains, des jardins: essais sur le kitsch pavillonnaire, Éditions Hazan, 1999
L'Idiotie. Art. vie. politique - méthode, Beaux-arts Magazine livres, 2003
Les Barrages de sable, éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2014
Félicien Marboeuf (1852-1924). Correspondence with Marcel Proust, éditions Verticales, 2022
He was the editor-in-chief of Exhibition magazine (a contemporary art programme broadcast on Arte, produced by MK2 TV).
Since 2009, he has hosted the video conference show L'encyclopédie des guerres, which can be seen at the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou4 and the Palais du Tau in Reims, among other venues. His project is to compile an encyclopaedia of all the wars in the history of mankind, and to share only the quotations he has collected.
Samuel Maoz
Samuel Maoz (in Hebrew שמואל (שמוליק) מעוז) is an Israeli film director born on 23 May 1962 in Tel Aviv. Lebanon, his first feature film, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. And his second film Foxtrot also won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, this time in 2017.
Paul 2020
Rachel 2017
Felwin Sarr
Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese academic and writer. He is a professor at Duke University (North Carolina), having previously taught at the Université Gaston-Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he is a full professor and associate professor of economics. His academic work focuses on economics, the ecology of knowledge, contemporary African philosophy, economic policy, epistemology, economic anthropology and the history of religious ideas.
Bénédicte Savoy
Bénédicte Savoy is a French academic and art historian. She is Professor of Art History at the Technical University of Berlin. From 2016 to 2021, she held the international chair in ‘Cultural history of artistic heritage in Europe, eighteenth to twentieth centuries’ at the Collège de France in Paris. As a specialist in the ‘translocation’ of works of art (including art theft and the art of plundering), in 2018 she and Felwine Sarr wrote a report on the restitution of African cultural heritage for President Emmanuel Macron.
Elia Suleiman 2013
Elia Suleiman, born on 28 July 1960 in Nazareth (Israel), is a Palestinian Christian director, screenwriter and actor of Israeli nationality. He is best known for his 2002 film, Intervention divine, a tragic modern comedy about daily life in the Palestinian territories, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. Often compared to Tati or Keaton, Elia Suleiman handles burlesque and gravity with the same poetic sense.
Yolande Zauberman
Yolande Zauberman was born in Paris into an Ashkenazi family and was fluent in French, English and Yiddish, which she spoke with her grandmother, who was still alive when she was a child. She began working in the film industry alongside Amos Gitai.
In 2018, her documentary M, presented at the Locarno Film Festival and filmed in Yiddish in Bnei Brak, a conservative and religious suburb of Tel Aviv, lifted the veil on paedophilia in Orthodox Jewish circles in Israel.
In 2023, the documentary film Classified People was restored. It was shown in cinemas in France, notably MK2.
In 2024, her documentary film La Belle de Gaza, about the social emancipation of young transgender people in Tel Aviv, was presented in the official selection at Cannes.