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.

Radio Ballast is the title of the project. Radio refers to the device that transmits information, while ballast is the bed of crushed rock on which the rails lie. In railway jargon, the term also refers to rumors of uncertain origin: vague, unfounded news, a mixture of assumptions and gossip, interwoven and often contradictory narratives. It’s easier to imagine that such rumors come from the tracks themselves. History often resembles such a rumor. It is never simple, but rather diverse, entangled, or refracted. It falls to the artist to propose forms of synthesis. That is precisely what François-Xavier Gbré sought to represent here.

Curator of the exhibition
Clément Chéroux
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

The exhibition
Franco-Ivorian photographer François-Xavier Gbré is the winner of the first edition of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ Latitudes program, mentored by Clément Chéroux, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. After its presentation at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Radio Ballast will travel, in 2026, to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, USA, and later to Côte d’Ivoire.

The Latitudes program
Inaugurated in 2024, Latitudes is a Fondation d’entreprise Hermès program developed in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

It broadens the scope of Immersion, the former French-American photography commission launched in 2014 with the same partners, a cross-residency between France and the United States.

The new program supporting contemporary creation takes its name from a geographical concept, affirming its ambition to shed light on artists from scenes that are still underrepresented on the international stage. In practice, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the ICP select a country from which photographers are invited to submit a project. A jury composed of representatives from the three institutions selects the annual winner.

The chosen photographer receives a grant to produce a new series. The resulting work is exhibited first in Paris at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, then in New York at the ICP, and finally in the winner’s home country.

Côte d’Ivoire is the first country to be honored in the two-year cycle inaugurated in 2024.

From 1975 to 1986, German photographer Sibylle Bergemann documented the creation of the Marx and Engels monument in East Berlin. The project, conceived in the aftermath of World War II and the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was ultimately entrusted in 1973 to the sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt, who allied himself with several other artists.

Bergemann began photographing informally, before receiving an official commission from the Ministry of Culture in 1977. Over the course of eleven years, she captured each stage of the process, from the earliest models to the monument’s inauguration on April 4, 1986.

Despite the publication of some images in the press as early as 1983 and their presentation in an official exhibition, it was only once the commission was completed that Bergemann fully reclaimed the body of work. Out of more than 400 developed rolls of film, she selected twelve photographs, which she brought together under the title Das Denkmal (The Monument). These images reveal a visual language far removed from official aesthetics. In a post-communist light, their deconstruction of heroic figures and underlying irony seem strikingly prescient. Yet no one could have foreseen the fall of the Berlin Wall just two years later. With rigorous objectivity, Bergemann managed to avoid censorship while delivering a stark and laconic portrayal of an ideology’s obsolescence.

In 1990, the publication of a book pairing Bergemann’s photographs with poems by Heiner Müller helped establish The Monument as an artistic landmark in this singular moment of German history. It remains today one of Bergemann’s most iconic series, and a defining piece of the artistic production of that era.

Curator of the exhibition
Sonia Voss
Independent curator

Production
This exhibition is produced by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in collaboration with the Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-de-France (CRP) and with the participation of the Estate Sibylle Bergemann.