Richard Pak « La Firme »

The Château d'Eau presents Richard Pak's series ‘La Firme’ (2016 - 2017), the first part of the ‘Islands of Desire’ series devoted to island space.
By combining photography, video, narrative and historical documents, Richard Pak tells the story of the community of Tristan da Cunha - a small volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic, the most isolated inhabited territory in the world - and questions the legacy of the idealistic values that founded this community 200 years ago.

The series La Firme is the first chapter in an anthology (The Islands of Desire) devoted to island space. The island, a place where few people live, nurtures an imagination shared by many. As well as simply being far away, they suggest a break with everyday life. Islands fascinate travellers just as much as they shape their inhabitants. In the collective imagination, they are on the fringes, representing the middle ground between the unknown and the known. The etymology of the word isoler refers to ‘to separate like an island (isola)’, and I could hardly have found a better person than Tristan da Cunha to begin a cycle on insularity. [...] La Firme is a multidisciplinary work that combines photography, video and narrative with historical documents consulted from the collections of various institutions (British Library, National Maritime Museum, Royal Geographical Society, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, etc.). The ensemble questions the legacy of the idealistic principles of equality and sharing established two centuries ago by William Glass, the founding father of this singular family of voluntary exiles. Richard Pak

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