‘Dunes,’ the photography series created by French artist Florence Joannes, is a poetic performance. Through bold, dynamic imagery, it attempts to convey complex concepts such as eternity, spectral metamorphosis, and transmigration of souls.
Joannes’ photography is beautifully crafted, managing to create surreal scenery without relying on abstract visuals or the aid of photo manipulation. The mystical captures merge elements of noir, album cover art, and ritualistic aesthetics, delivering an ode to symmetrical and minimalist intricacies. The subtle dynamism and unexpected choice of post-processed tones create a slightly divergent atmosphere across the series, hinting at how eclectic and open to interpretation the photographer wishes the work to be.
The severed pieces of yarn attached to the subjects’ fingers bring to mind a Taoist red thread of fate. In the purgatory of dunes all connections are null, and the attempt to recreate them is void. Therefore, Joannes focuses on portraying individual despair of involuntary detachment, letting each subject fall into their own heap of oblivion.
Artist’s Note:
“‘Dunes’ is an immortal world, inspired by the block universe theory and the Buddhist concept of Samsara. Time closes in on itself, and wanderers are condemned to trample the remnants of past lives and futures already written. Beneath the shattered stars, nothing happens, yet everything is destroyed; a broken gaze lingers for eternity and falls without impact, repeating endlessly.
The dunes represent eternal and futile metamorphosis, a cyclical impermanence. With each gust of wind, a new landscape emerges, identical in every way to the previous one, yet foreign. They swallow the face and engulf every fragment of the soul of those who plunge into them. They are sculpted by the accumulation of the tottering silhouettes of those who still believe they can flee toward a horizon that already contains their failure and by the elongated shadows, carcasses that have given up.
The soul of this place is sometimes revealed in the glint of a gaze if I let my subject yield to the call of the void and join the dunes to drown there. The only escape: dissolution.”
Read our “Roots” issue in full
The new theme, born as usual from what the submitted works held in common, is “ROOTS.” Within its pages, we present the artworks, creativity, and inspiration of 60 visual artists and writers from 21 countries around the world. Their diverse voices come together around a shared exploration of the return to where one belongs, the invisible threads of tradition that shape identity, and the ongoing reconnection with nature, others, and oneself.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
