The title of this exhibition is taken from the text that accompanies an image from Max Pam's Hindustan autobiographies series. It could be translated as “How could we do a portrait of the wind? and it is with these few words in mind that Marcelline Delbecq and Aurélien Mole selected a set of photographs for the Image/Imatge space. As if each had determined the next, its echo carried by the wind.
By essence invisible, the wind is a movement of air masses attracted by atmospheric pressure and depression. But its invisibility does not make it imperceptible: it reveals itself to us when it encounters an object that resists it. In a poetic way, the selection of images gathered here seeks to show that the works are inhabited by a force similar to that of the wind. Photography, perhaps because it struggles with time, is an all the more special case: this force that inhabits it is often visible a posteriori, when History becomes salient and the readable elements to the photographic surface come into contact with it.

A first image was chosen: Sea Scouts, Carnival of Unity, Hong Kong, 30.06.97 by Bruno Serralongue. It shows a child dressed as a Sea scout, staring in our direction. At his side, a character in a tyrannosaurus costume holds a brick of Tropicana apple juice. And while How does one portrait the wind prepares, the suppressed rumor of the demonstrations which oppose the pro-democracy subjects to the central power, vassal of China since the island was restored by the English in 1997, reaches us from Hong Kong despite the distance. Obviously, and this is what conditioned the choice of works, current events are perceptibly modifying the way we look at this image, suddenly inhabited by a force that goes beyond it.

The silver process can become one of its possible metaphors: once the sensitive paper is exposed, the image is latent there and only appears under the action of the developer. All the photographs were therefore chosen from the collections of the three FRACs, paying particular attention to this latent content inscribed in each of the works and revealed by current events in the world. Each photograph is therefore to be read through the events that burst into our daily lives. By summoning the present, these witnesses to the past see themselves as harbingers of ruptures to come in an uncertain future.

By spinning the metaphor of silver photography, we also note the importance of darkness as a condition for the revelation of images. Thus, at irregular intervals, the exhibition How does one portray the wind? will be plunged into darkness for a few moments. Retinal persistence will then freeze the last image seen just as the sudden darkness will freeze the body of visitors.