Islander. In the footsteps of Saint-John Perse: Interview with François Sureau, of the French Academy.

Saint-John Perse, whose real name was Alexis Leger, born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1887, settled in the place called La Polynésie, on the Giens peninsula, in 1957. "I have just lived in almost an absolute," he testified in a letter to Mina Curtiss, the American friend who gave him a villa facing the sea, Les Vigneaux . Perse rediscovers scents, a sky, an expanse that evoke the Caribbean island of his childhood, but he also gradually appropriates a light, a relief, a Mediterranean land that will become in part the poetic material of his last works.
Photographer Sandrine Expilly herself has an intimate knowledge of this place, which she has explored many times since childhood: "I know this piece of land in the far south of the Var region almost by heart; it resembles a ship facing the open sea and each time takes me somewhere else. For several years, I walked around the house where Saint-John Perse lived, tried to follow in his footsteps, guessed and imagined his steps on the peninsula. In this photographic series, I question the boundary between land and sea, between the real and dreamlike landscape. I use the natural material of the place to leave my own mark."
While Sandrine Expilly's photographs invite us to rediscover Saint-John Perse's work through sensation, they are far from assigning his poetry to a single place. François Sureau, illuminating the poet's journey in an interview at the beginning of this catalog, recalls "the curious exile that was his entire life." The images here succeed in resonating with Perse's poetics, which constantly praises the world in all its dimensions, elevates this song to an absolute, and celebrates the elemental forces of life.