Album Architectures Abidjan

An iconographic work on the modern architecture of Abidjan which aims to offer a photographic survey of thirty buildings representative of the chosen moment of architecture that followed independence

This is not an architecture book but a photography book on an architecture that expresses itself through diversity It is a book that intends to offer a photographic view of buildings in Abidjan that bear the imprint of a certain tropical modernism
More precisely Album Architectures Abidjan is the testimony of an encounter between two individuals who live and share an aesthetic and emotional attachment to the lagoon city Issa Diabat architect contemporary actor of the architectural future of this city that never stops reinventing itself FranoisXavier Gbr a photographer who has made architecture his preferred medium for apprehending the muted history of places by envisaging architectures as the sedimentary traces of the social and political changes of a country the Ivory Coast
This book and the Album Architectures collection more broadly aims to initiate a reflection on the definition of the notion of contemporary heritage through the valorisation of rich and singular architectural landscapes not always identified often invisibilised of cities in perpetual urban change

Born in 1978 in Lille France FranoisXavier Gbr is a FrancoIvorian photographer who lives and works between the Marais Poitevin in France and AbidjanThe photographic work of this mixedrace artist of Ivorian origin who grew up in the north of France apprehends architecture landscape and urbanity in the form of a documentary testimony that evokes the architectural photography of Lewis Baltz Stephen Shore and Guy Tillim From Mali to Israel from Lille to Rabat Franois Xavier Gbr photographs abandoned architectures bearing the traces of their countrys social and political history His photographs take a distanced look at the buildings and the symbolic charge that history and historicity give them They are interested in the past in the muted history of places reveal the invisibilities of everyday life and petrify fragments of a world in perpetual mutation In a soft radicality he testifies of the inbetween of these moments of tipping revealed with force by the architecture
FranoisXavier Gbrs work can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou Paris France the Tate Modern London UK the Smithsonian Institution Washington USA the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane Australia Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia Chazen Museum of ArtUniversity of Wisconsin Madison USA Walther Collection Ulm Germany Rencontres dArles Arles France Fonds National dArt Contemporain Paris France and Muse des Confluences Lyon France
In 2020 FranoisXavier Gbr is the winner of the Louis Roederer Prize of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie dArles

Baptiste Manet is an architect specialised in contemporary heritage He is the cofounder and director with Yann Legouis of the Sapiens Architectes office He is also the cofounder of the association ditions Cosa Mentale and a teacher at the cole nationale darchitecture de ParisBelleville Paris In 2022 Baptiste Manet participated in the experimental residential programme for the research and study of artistic practice and thought organised by the RAW Academy in Dakar and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia
Martial Manet has a PhD in Law and graduated in philosophy from the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris He has been Visiting Scholar at the Institute for African Studies at Columbia University NewYork He teaches at the University of Paris I Panthon Sorbonne Paris

bilingual edition English French
128 pages
24 x 32 cm softcover
ISBN 9782493283115

&nbsp