Two Photographic Visions of Memory and Power: Tracing Histories from Côte d’Ivoire’s Railways to East Berlin’s Monuments
François-Xavier Gbré, série Radio Ballast, Katiola, 2024. © François-Xavier Gbré, Adagp, Paris, 2025
The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris presented Radio Ballast by Franco-Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré and Le Monument by German photographer Sibylle Bergemann, on view from 29 October 2025 to 11 January 2026. Together, the exhibitions explored the afterlives of ideology, architecture, and memory through two distinct yet resonant visual languages.
François-Xavier Gbré: Radio Ballast
For over fifteen years, François-Xavier Gbré has photographed the traces of human activity across Africa’s landscapes and architectures. His latest project, Radio Ballast, examined the colonial railway that runs through Côte d’Ivoire from north to south, a line built initially to extract and export the country’s natural resources during the French colonial period.
The series reflected the layered temporality embedded in these spaces: colonial infrastructures, post-independence transformation, and contemporary realities. The term radio ballast refers to the bed of stones supporting the railway tracks, but in railway jargon it also evokes “rumours of unknown origin” — stories that seem to emanate from the rail itself. Gbré used this metaphor to consider history as a chorus of fragmented, overlapping voices rather than a single, linear narrative.
Curated by Clément Chéroux, Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the exhibition marked Gbré’s recognition as the inaugural laureate of the Latitudes programme, an international photography initiative founded by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York.
Following its presentation in Paris, Radio Ballast was scheduled to travel to ICP in New York and later to Côte d’Ivoire in 2026, bringing the project back to its geographic and historical origins.
Gbré’s practice, situated between architecture and archaeology, transforms structures into vessels of memory and instruments of reflection. His photographs of stations, bridges, and decaying infrastructures document not only the passage of time but also the persistence of history within the landscape.
A bilingual monograph, François-Xavier Gbré — Radio Ballast, co-published by Atelier EXB and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, accompanied the exhibition and featured texts by Clément Chéroux, Sandrine Colard, and Gauz.
Sibylle Bergemann: Le Monument
In parallel, Le Monument revisited the monumental Marx and Engels sculpture in former East Berlin, a project that photographer Sibylle Bergemann documented from 1975 to 1986. Over eleven years, Bergemann followed the creation of the statue designed by Ludwig Engelhardt, from early models to its installation in Marx-Engels-Forum, producing more than 400 rolls of film.
From these, she selected twelve photographs that formed Das Denkmal (Le Monument), a quietly subversive body of work that departs from official East German iconography. Through irony, precision, and restraint, Bergemann’s images expose both the fragility and absurdity of ideological representation.
Her black-and-white photographs capture moments of assembly, testing, and suspension, monumental fragments emerging from scaffolds and fields. In retrospect, Le Monument anticipated the collapse of the Berlin Wall just two years later, offering an unflinching portrait of belief rendered obsolete.
Curated by Sonia Voss, the exhibition was produced by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in collaboration with the Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-de-France (CRP) and with the participation of the Succession Sibylle Bergemann.
A comprehensive monograph, Sibylle Bergemann — Le Monument, published by Kerber Verlag, gathered for the first time the complete photographic series alongside critical essays by Christian Joschke, Heiner Müller, Steffen Siegel, and Sonia Voss. The book situates Bergemann’s work within the historical, political, and aesthetic contexts of late socialist East Germany, reframing the series as both a document and a critique.
A Dialogue Across Time and Ideology
Though separated by geography and generation, Gbré and Bergemann shared a commitment to documenting architecture as a site of historical negotiation. Both artists used photography as a language of archaeology, unearthing what lies beneath the surfaces of progress and ideology.
At the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, their works together articulated the tension between permanence and decay, construction and collapse, and the shifting architectures of power and belief.
François-Xavier Gbré: Radio Ballast and Sibylle Bergemann: Le Monument is on view until 11 January 2026 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. For more information, visit henricartierbresson.org.
