Valérie Jouve

Valérie Jouve’s works in photography and film address the subject of people and their urban environment. With her anthropologically trained gaze she generally combines portraits and topographic views to create condensed images, by staging figures in often exaggerated poses in front of city backdrops. In her multimedia project Münsterlands, installed in a pedestrian underpass on Schlossplatz as a film, image and sound composition, she explored the impact of specific sites on the human body and vice versa.

Jouve’s filmed surveys focused predominantly on Münster and its environs. It was recorded from the perspective of strangers approaching the city from different directions. The journey was undertaken on foot, by train and by boat, leading from the periphery to the centre, to the site of the artistic installation. Jouve consciously avoided narration, cartographic legibility and any touristic perception of the city and its landmarks. Using experimental cinematography the artist shot footage of the urban surroundings from the viewpoint of these protagonists, thereby conveying a multilayered experience of time and space. In conjunction with the photographs, that were visible only in semi-darkness and accompanied by recordings of a whispering voice, the film projection created a space of various levels of sensorial perception beyond rational understanding.¹

Beate Pittnauer

¹ Cf. Valérie Jouve, “Münsterlands”, in: Brigitte Franzen, Kasper König and Carina Plath (eds.), sculpture projects muenster 07, exhib. cat. LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Cologne, 2007, p. 123.