Libuše Jarcovjáková lives in Prague. She studies at the Film Academy (FAMU), but her images are too eccentric. She can't find places to display them. The communities of marginalized workers, the bars of homosexuals, friends and lovers, which she has been photographing since 1970, cannot be shown. This also applies to herself, when she portrays herself naked or masturbating. The Prague Spring was little more than an illusion, and the fall of the Berlin Wall is far away. Prague is a prison and the camera is the only way to escape. The unbearable lightness of being, and the irrepressible vitality of the body, also invades the images of the photographer. The groin of her friend Eva lying on a bed that grabs a glass placed just above the lowered briefs, from the series Killing Summer (1984), is a sort of programmatic manifesto. The photographer enters the frame with her body. It is her hand that lowers her friend's  panties . Body and look coincide. The look touches, grabs, intervenes. Sex and alcohol are among the few permitted means with which to oppose a repressive power that has reduced the human being to a mutilated being. Intoxication and abandonment make up the visual plot. It fills the gaze of the photographer who is hallucinated like the light of the flash that shoots on the subjects, and is distorted by it, like a body that abandons itself, in the same way as the blurred and grainy outlines of many of its images. "I was able to express myself with photography as I wanted, because I had nothing to lose in this context of repression," says Jarcovjáková. And the hundreds of photos in her exhibition, even too many, bear witness to her with an expressive force that envelops the spectator's gaze between its nocturnal forms and ambiguity.

The "Evokativ" exhibition by Libuše Jarcovjáková is one of the three that best describe this edition of the Rencontres, in which the fifty years since its foundation are celebrated. The others, which are part of the "Mon Corps est une Arme section. Exister, Eésister, Photographier" are "Les libertés intérieures. Photographie Est-Allemande" 1980-1989 and "La Movida. Chronique d’une agitation" 1978-1988.
The uncertainty, the mobility, the disquieting provisional nature of its history seems to also reach another city: Berlin. There are no doubts. The divided Germany becomes the visible sign of a laceration that cuts history and Europe, and that remains engraved on the bodies. A divided city is synonymous with a divided identity. The sixteen photographers living in East Berlin embody this rift. How is it possible to express one's individuality in a society where the singular is sacrificed to the collective? With inner freedom. If the wall is impenetrable, the body still manages to creep into it. The photographs become the form of a poignant art that resembles adolescence for its mixture of artifice and ingenuity, intransigent feelings and intellectualism, violent protest and disarming abandonment. Each of them tries to survive a city, whose history seems unnaturally blocked. One of the reactions to this sense of immovable and immutable time is fully perceived in the images of Tina Bara. In particular in the 2016 film "Lange Weile", composed of 400 images that testify of her life and that of the group of friends, from 1983 to 1989. Lange Weile means boredom, literally "long while". Resisting it is a strategy. It means resisting the slowness that power imposes on time. Showing the body means breaking the uniformity of a monotonous and homologated time. Boredom, therefore, is not only a distancing from something that one does not feel like belonging to, but also what leads Tina Bara and the other photographers to come back to themselves, to listen to each other, see each other and find a possible escape route. It is a labile border between exterior and interior. In his images, immobility changes its mark. Indeed, it seems that in that interminable visual sequence the future can be lived in advance. The photographs therefore prefigure a life that goes beyond the long moment of boredom they have staged. In East Berlin you can see, hear and feel the possibility of a change.

Photography is an accumulation of tensions, ideas, experiences. They completely overturn the idea that nothing seems interesting when it belongs to you. Everything is interesting here, because it's all possessed. Life, music, exhibited bodies, disguises: everything is mobile. The face of Pedro Almodóvar, made up of a woman, with a hairy chest, symbolizes a freedom regained and fully lived. But the essence of the movida is all in the images of Ouka Leele, pseudonym of Barbara Allende Gil de Biedma. Her photographs are very colorful, lively and ironic. They are parodies. The image of a woman holding a straw between her lips, an immense halo of lemons on her head, is the icon of the Rencontres. Everything is similar to the dream. "Mystique Domestisque" is the title of her exhibition. Inner freedom is overflowing beyond the image. And the body claimed it, as a desire that for a long time had to hide.

Shows

1 June - 22 September 2019 (https://www.rencontres-arles.com/) director Sam Stourdzé

Evokativ by Libuše Jarcovjáková, curated by Lucie Černá

Les libertés intérieures. Photographie Est-Allemande 1980-1989 curated by Sonia Voss

La Movida. Chronique d’une agitation 1978-1988 curated by Antoine de Beaupré, Pepe Font de Mora, Irene de Mendoza.