Chauvet - Pont d'Arc, l'inappropriable

"A cave needs to be treated with infinite prudence; as a landscape, a natural area that awakens a deep sense of time immemorial." Raphaël Dallaporta.

« Chauvet - Pont d'Arc: L'inappropriable » is the result of a work developed by the artist Raphaël Dallaporta in the decorated cave of Pont-d'Arc, known as Grotte Chauvet. This geological site in the heart of the Ardèche department of southern France was untouched for more than 20 000 years, before being rediscovered in 1994. The access to its hundreds of cave paintings has been severely restricted to researchers and scientists.

Thanks to the Association pour la Mise en Valeur de la Grotte Ornée du Pont-d'Arc (organisation devoted to promoting the decorated cave of Pont d'Arc) and to the Ministry of Culture, Raphaël Dallaporta has taken panoramic views of the inside of the cave, which he presents in the form of planispheres, following the model conceived by American inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller in 1946: the Fuller Projection enables views to unfold without any perspective distortion.

Reproduced on the walls of la Gare du Nord, Raphaël Dallaporta's work invites the viewers to shift the way they look at the cave. He tilts their perception by creating an imbalance, in a metaphor of the world?s movements, of the rotation of the Earth and planets. The artist thus refers to the anthropological hypothesis according to which the caves and the universe are linked to one another.

On the ground, (an adhesive strip refers) to the footbridge which is the only path through the cave and ensures its preservation. In the Paris-Nord train station, it collects the footprints of the thousands of daily passers-by.

For more than a decade, Raphaël Dallaporta, born in France in 1980, has created works in collaboration with the military, doctors and researchers. He uses methods and languages specific to these fields in his artistic approach, to extricate photography out of its documentary condition and instead convey a symbolic vision.

An exhibition presented by SNCF Gares & Connexions and Paris Photo.
In collaboration with the gallery Jean-Kenta Gauthier(Paris).

The photographs were taken in connection to the Photography contest of la Grotte ornée du Pont-d'Arc, Grotte Chauvet.

This work will be published by Éditions Xavier Barral :  
'Raphaël Dallaporta , Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, l'inappropriable' (October 2016)


© Pino Musi / Installation vew, Gare du Nord, 'Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, l'inappropriable', Raphaël Dallaporta, Éditions Xavier Barral, by kind permission of the artist and of the gallery Jean-Kenta Gauthier (Paris)