The worn heel of a shoe that continues to tread the streets of the city. The tired foot of someone who has perhaps faced a long journey and stops for a short rest. The freshly ironed white stocking of the young woman running towards university or waiting for the bus at the stop. These are some of the details immortalized in the “Á Pied” exhibition , inaugurated in Cagliari last May 9th at the municipal cultural center “Il Ghetto” and scheduled until June 22nd. The signature is that of the French anthropologist Elisabeth Euvrard who, after living in Cagliari for 25 years, returns to the island to exhibit her artistic creation.
The scholar, who now lives and works in Paris where she teaches French to foreigners, has undertaken a path of photographic research strongly influenced by her anthropological studies , in which she collects fragments of urban stories contained in a glance. For her, photography is a medium, a catwalk between different communities, the past and the present, the self and the other. Euvrard's gaze chooses to focus on the feet, bare or shod, which become a synecdoche, the part for the whole, of his subjects, caught on the street, in the subway, in the parks, at work. Interviewed about her project, she talks about stability and the idea of building a new balance starting from the feet, which support us and connect us to the earth: we need to observe them closely to appreciate their qualities, their diversity.
This is how the anthropologist, from her gaze behind the camera, discovers a humanity through the posture of the feet , reveals the poverty, loneliness and wounds that are reflected in the consumption or sometimes in the absence of shoes, or in the wear of a heel, in what she herself defines as a sociology of the intimate, full of details that tell the fashions and socio-cultural environments of our time, a condition, a given moment, the little story of each one .
(Unioneonline/vf)
