2023-07-22 05:30:13
Eva Jospin, on the beach of Beauduc, in the Camargue, June 19, 2023. OLIVIER MONGE / MYOP FOR “THE WORLD”
When she was a child, Eva’s vacations were spent in Provence, where her parents came to find refuge with friends. In those days, there was always a moment when the whole gang left for a picnic by the sea. Two hours on the road to reach Beauduc (Bouches-du-Rhône), at the very end of the Camargue: crossing the Rhône by ferry, to finish on a bumpy track winding between marshes and the flamboyance of pink flamingos before finally arriving on this inhospitable and wild land facing the sea.
Forty years have passed. We went back on the road with her, Eva Jospin, who has become the plastic artist celebrated everywhere, this summer in Brussels as in Mexico City, and – until January 2024 – in Avignon, at the Palais des Papes, which she has taken over with its cardboard forests, its artificial caves and its Baroque panoramas.
The ferry to cross the Rhône, flamingos, gorse, gray sand, and a camp of weathered surfers on arrival. It’s all there, the end of the world in its severe beauty. The delta sliding into the sea. “It’s not the beach with deckchairs here, but a sea that has to be earned, where you take the wrong path, where the sand is gray and the view is lost in the immensity. At one time, there was a whole village of huts, where you could eat tellines, the dwarf version of the clam, cooked with garlic cream. »
Happy childhood
Aware of the people pages of the magazines, many bet that she would suggest that we meet on the Ile de Ré. “Too connotedshe explains. All these celebrities who go there posed as a sticker on my father. While it’s not really his place. And, for me, it came much later…” His father is Lionel Jospin, Socialist Prime Minister from 1997 to 2002. The Ile de Ré is his mother-in-law, Sylviane Agacinski. The philosopher and academic – who, before meeting Lionel Jospin, had a child with the philosopher Jacques Derrida – likes to find her sister there, the actress Sophie Agacinski, married to the actor Jean-Marc Thibault… Eva Jospin laughs: “I like going out of season. Even if there are too many sand shrimps for a small nature like me. »
“Here, on the other hand, more than a beach, it’s a territory. » The visual artist points with her chin to the horizon that never ends. “This mixture of mineral and vegetal, all these sedimentations, to which I was already sensitive as a child, have a monochrome aspect like the cardboard from which I make my works. In both cases, when you get close, if you look at them closely, there is plenty of color. It’s my Proust madeleine. »
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