LIEBAERT Pierre

Macquenoise

Belgique

2014Carte blanche Xavier Canonne

“Macquenoise” is the bittersweet portrait of a mother and son who live secluded life with only animals for company, at the mercy of the seasons. From this oedipal relationship wells up a violence suffocated by a state of immobility. Sometimes, a look seems to be a cry for help, a warning that we heed while remaining mute, powerless. Macquenoise might well be the name of a dance of death. The memory of an original sacrifice from the very edge of a horizon that sighs, between light and darkness.

But it is a village on the fringes of Belgium, on the French frontier. We see there the shadow of the mother, planted like a knobby oak-tree, and that of the limping son. Two characters so deeply engrained in the earth they live on that they have taken root there forever.

To capture these images, Pierre LIEBAERT has steeped himself in this family’s intimacy until he becomes part of it. The photographer has tuned himself to the slow rhythm of the farm and his hosts by deliberate mimicry. He reveals a mundane interior haloed by warmth, indicating a simple, uneventful life that seems set to last for eternity.

Septembre Tiberghien