Traverser le soleil

"Traverser le soleil"

from Monday, November 3, 2025 to Saturday, April 11, 2026

FRAC Corsica

Bringing together the young photography scene in Corsica is an attempt to take the pulse of a region through those who live there, pass through it, or see it differently. The title of this exhibition echoes Jérôme Ferrari's novel À son image (2018), in which photography becomes at once a trace, an enigma, and an attempt—always fragile—to capture life as it slips away. The title of the book can be read as a reference to the divine—to humans shaped in the image of God—as well as to the photographer, a discreet and ambivalent heroine whose gaze moves between war zones abroad and the political and nationalist tensions of Corsica at the end of the 20th century. By choosing the plural pronoun, À leur image affirms an openness: that of a multiplicity of subjectivities and perspectives, which allow us to question the current ways in which our territory continues to be seen, traveled, thought about, and experienced.
The exhibition brings together artists whose approaches intersect and respond to each other around an essential question: how can an island like Corsica be represented today?

Between attachment, distance, social realities, contemporary changes, and symbolic legacies, this geography offers an inexhaustible field of exploration. Some were born there, live there, or return there, while others have simply stayed there. Their images compose a kaleidoscope of perspectives: political, social, cultural, and above all, sensitive. In this series of Polaroids, Sabatina Leccia explores fragmented memories of light and island landscapes.

Each image, unique and fragile, captures a fleeting apparition: a sunset, a silhouette, a reflection on the sea, a burst of flowers or shadows. The instantaneous nature of the Polaroid reinforces this impression of transience, as if the artist were seeking to capture the impossible permanence of the sun in its course. The images compose an intimate and sensitive visual diary, where real visions and chromatic alterations intermingle. The saturated or washed-out hues, the dominant pinks and purples, the overexposures and surface accidents convey the subjectivity of the gaze: it is not documentary transparency that is sought, but the opaque trace of a luminous experience. This intensity is also nourished by the experience specific to the Corsican diaspora, who, during their summer returns, rediscover the island with a gaze that is both familiar and dazzled.

Chercher le soleil is thus constructed as an affective cartography of the island, where each Polaroid is less an image than a fragment of attention, a way of capturing the moment just as it is slipping away. The accumulation does not create a linear narrative but a fragile and discontinuous fabric of appearances, which makes light the site of a silent struggle against oblivion.