Jean-Marc Caracci: Homo Urbanus Europeanus

In 2015, he plans to photograph Bucharest once again. As he told Agata Mendrychowska in the interview published in this catalogue, he “did not do a good job in 2009 because of the bad weather and, consequently, the unsuitable light”. This year he also plans to visit three more capitals: Chișinău, Tbilisi and Yerevan. The latter two are admittedly capitals of Asian countries under the International Geographical Union’s definition, but the division of Eurasia into continents is purely conventional. Both Georgia and Armenia are linked to Europe by Christian civilisation (Armenia was the world’s first Christian country) and by centuries of shared history. Both emphasise their European roots and pro-European aspirations. The artist’s plans to visit Tbilisi and Yerevan further underline the political dimension of the Homo Urbanus Europeanus project. Although born in Tunisia, the artist has lived in Montpellier, France, since he was one year old and takes pride in being European, as he stresses in the interview conducted for the Łódź presentation: “Every European country is or can be included in the series, whether or not it belongs to the European Union yet… It is a way of saying that we are all Europeans and proud to be so. Indeed, this is why numerous Representations and Delegations of the European Commission have acquired the rights to organise a Homo Urbanus Europeanus exhibition… and why the series was selected for an exhibition during Plzeň 2015, European Capital of Culture (March–April 2015).”

Homo Urbanus Europeanus has already been presented many times in Europe, as well as in Asia and Australia. In Poland, selections from the project were shown in Warsaw in 2008 and Szczecin in 2009.

Last year, forty-one photographs from the series were displayed at the Museum of Intercultural Dialogue, a branch of the National Museum in Kielce. At Atlas Sztuki we will show sixty-three works by the artist, including photographs taken last year in Skopje, Sarajevo and Pristina.

In his artistic explorations, Jean-Marc Caracci is interested in the human being — in human existence captured at a particular, specific moment and, in the case of Homo Urbanus Europeanus, in an urban environment against a backdrop of monumental buildings, bridges and viaducts, vast squares and passageways. As Tomasz Ferenc observes in his essay on the artist’s project: “Caracci does not seek out landmarks, obvious and readily recognisable places. As a rule, he works in spaces that are difficult to identify. A fragment of a park in Madrid could be one of Łódź’s parks; a pedestrian crossing in Bratislava could be on the outskirts of Paris or anywhere else. In only a few cases is identification possible without a caption: Istanbul, Rome, Riga. Yet even this does not alter the impression that it could all be one enormous city in which the photographer, like a hunter, patiently waited for passers-by.”

At the end of his analysis of Homo Urbanus Europeanus, Tomasz Ferenc asks: “What message can we read in Jean-Marc Caracci’s photographic series? What purpose does this journey through European capitals serve?” In response, he describes the artist’s project as “undoubtedly an artistic manifesto for a unifying Europe” and adds: “Caracci returns to a humanist vision of photography whose simple message is intended to reach everyone. Yet it is also a story about the beauty of European cities, made possible by the efforts of successive generations of ‘urban people’. It is also a reminder of the need to protect the urban environment, which for most of us has become the only one in which we are able to function efficiently.”