manifesto

Manifesto, passage 001

Between Unknowns was born of a desire to share lives other than our own, through silver prints found in Paris. Photographs signed by strangers, tossed from flea market to flea market, blown away by the wind or torn between clumsy fingers. These fragile fragments that time threatens to erase, we try to collect, to preserve, to honour — so as to crystallise the lives that once tried to tell themselves. To take up those efforts at narration and make them part of our own history, or at the very least a privileged interlocutor. Before everything fades and oblivion sets in. Because yes, oblivion is waiting for them.

Manifesto, passage 002

But this project is not a rescue from an invented shipwreck; there is nothing pseudo-heroic in our quest. On the contrary, it was born, and exists, to confirm an intimate conviction: artistic talent can remain unknown, anonymous, and sometimes die without ever knowing itself. Between Unknowns is the celebration of an art belonging to everyone. Made by everyone. And for that, the first battle is to accept anonymity, to embrace it. No grand investigation, no archival obsession. Far from us any wish to dig up names, dates, addresses or street corners. Not out of laziness, but because to our mind beauty is not there. It is elsewhere: in the dialogue we hold with these images, here and now, in the present, without the explanations of the past, without its informational diktats trying to impose one precise reading. To fully accept anonymity. To finally free the gaze. To be master of what one sees, to see as one wishes.

Manifesto, passage 003

Collecting paper photographs sounds anachronistic. Born of a sickly melancholy. And yet it is nothing of the sort. To us it is profoundly contemporary. Joyfully redemptive. At a time when a few prompts can generate images of a past that never existed, when visual lies proliferate, the silver print stands as a rampart — fragile, but tangible — for preserving some kind of historical truth. Faced with an Internet saturated by artificially generated images, our eyes worry about being manipulated and lost in a fog of pixels. So it is perhaps out of pessimism about the future that we declare ourselves optimistic about this collection. The physical as a lighthouse in the night. We argue for a return to material intelligence, a return to the senses, to touch, to smell. To photographs soiled by grubby fingers, to the ones that smell of the bottom of an ashtray. No matter, it will always be better than their artificial shit.

Manifesto, passage 004

It is through these rough edges that our collection becomes precious — but only from the moment it is shared. Between Unknowns wants to show, to exhibit, to print its collection. To exhibit the past in galleries, in books, in order to crystallise the way we live in the present.

Manifesto, passage 005

To establish a real dialogue between yesterday and today, and also between artists who never knew one another and those who, today, can no longer be ignored.