Galleries in Paris

Les Princes de la rue

Paris’ popular districts, its markets, its traffic, its kebabs, crossing, sometimes exhibited bodies.
Money circulating as fast as gazes. Cigarette-sellers reign under the air metro Barbès. People act like observation axes: nothing escapes them. «Street Princes» is part of «Boyzone», a long-term project in which Clarisse Hahn observes situations in which human bodies structure our relationship to space and intimacy.
Bodies, gazes: Clarisse Hahn’s films and photographies, focused on communities and rituals, go beyond the Other’s consent to be observed. They show how social beings can use the act of being observed as a medium of expression: being observed without being submitted. Rather than ethnographer, Clarisse Hahn acts as a documentarist whose attitude is everything but egoist: the artist disappears behind human bodies expressing their strength, their weakness and their pain – but also their history.
By using archival images, Clarisse Hahn creates a sort of desynchronization reflecting invisible genealogies. These jung people are the heirs of those French soldiers who were recruited during the colonization era. No matter if irony or historical trick, heroes and anti-heroes become here one same thing. Barbès, as a street of miracles, hosts the Ancient as well as the Excluded. The latter carry the signs of a history which has all but recovered. Bruised chairs as well as memories. Many cultures host some kind of «Boyzone» : in joy, in incarceration, in devotion, in survival, in labor, humans speak the language of their anatomy. A procession of both soft and brutal attitudes walks down the street, Clarisse Hahn observes «people between people». Her experience as a documentarist allows the construction of an invisible presence. Human gazes acts like as objects, human bodies are erotic. In those cold mornings, the male gaze has evaporated.
It snowed in Barbès last winter. Last winter, it snowed in Alger as well.

Michel Poivert, 2021