PARIS.- 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.

Born in 1978 in Lille, France. François-Xavier Gbré lives and works between La Rochelle (France) and Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire).

Steeped in time and geography, Gbré’s work draws on the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. From colonial remains to landscapes redefined by current events, Gbré explores territories and revisits History. The constant dialogue with his environment leads him to use different scales and exhibition methods, whether crafting meticulous installations based on thorough investigations of the land, or using architecture itself to make photography resonate through a physical relationship with the viewer or the public space.

His work has been shown in Paris and Abidjan at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, which represents him, at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, the Venice Biennale in Italy, in Madagascar, Nigeria, the United States, and various European countries.

His works are included, among others, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm, Germany – New York, USA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), the Collection of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (France), and the FNAC – Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France).

In 2020, François-Xavier Gbré was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. In 2024, he becomes the first laureate of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Latitudes program.