4 September, 2025
François-Xavier Gbré is drawn to traces. For the past fifteen years or so, he has been photographing the imprints of human activity on the landscape and architecture of the African continent. In 2023, as part of the Latitudes support program developed by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, he set out to follow the railway that runs from north to south through Côte d’Ivoire. The line was built during the French colonial era to extract the country’s natural resources and transport them to the port of Abidjan, then on to the metropole. Gbré’s photographs are infused with a kind of latent historicity made up of multiple overlapping temporal layers: the colonial period, the post-Independence years, and more recent events.