A photograph of a Krupp or GEG factory reveals practically nothing about the parent firm, but insists on serving as a basis for the active construction of something artificial, something fabricated. Bertold Brecht

Fabienne Ballandras's photographic series generally have dual access points: a spatial, and therefore formal, problematic, but also one that is event-based, reflecting or announcing more urgent issues. She initially worked in the landscape genre, focussing on ecological questions well before they became all-pervasive in political discourse. More recently, Transfert d'activités questioned the physical and collective space of work, reconstituting the theatre of socio-economic events that were making the headlines: insider trading, closures, relocations, etc. The latest series – Du fric ou boum ("Cash or boom") and Sentimentale Intellektuelle – go further, with two possible spaces of social, and therefore "public", anger: the kind of exterior space in which protests take place, and the interior, restricted space of Stammheim prison in Stuttgart. In both series, references to current events hark back to a previous historical period: the slogans and declarations in Du fric ou boum (as in Transfert d'activités) naturally recall those of May '68; and it was in Stammheim that the leaders of the Red Army Faction were held in the 1970s. Finally, the slogan that can sporadically be made out on flags in the film Everybody talks about the weather... was used by the German railway company in the 1930s. It was appropriated by the left in the 1960s, and provided the title for a volume of Ulrike Meinhof's writings, published in America. Ballandras interweaves temporalities – past and present – not in order to provide an apologia for a troubled historical period, but to "slow down" the images, to counter the immediacy that generally characterises them, and to further add to the semantic stratification.

The works do not, therefore, take a "stand", but a "position", as Georges Didi-Huberman has expressed it ¹, so as to reactivate history and memory, and to reinject time, whether historical or simply chronological. Sentimentale Intellektuelle alludes to a very precise location – Stammheim prison – but unlike Du fric ou boum it was not intended as a response to a live issue. The prison, in this instance, represents a locus of duration, dilated time, a slowness whose productive potential might be called into question.

So far, Ballandras's visual sources have essentially been media images that she has reconstituted in the form of maquettes. ² It might be supposed that the materiality of this slow elaboration makes it possible to bring to the surface of the image the "fecundity of the document" which, according to Walter Benjamin ³, modern photography addresses. But there is no documentary purism here: though well informed about her subject, Ballandras is not looking for authentic documents or original images. In order to render a work more substantive, she does not hesitate to introduce further heterogeneity, or to multiply different viewpoints on a given surface, while complexifying the protocol of construction of her images by diversifying the sources and media, and placing new filters between the work and its subject. Thus it is that she obscures the question of origins, replacing one form of expression by another – photography by painting or drawing, language or text by photography or sculpture. More than ever, her sources are second-hand. She had not been to Stammheim before starting work on the project: her first drawings were based on photographs of sets from the film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, and the reconstitutions of the cells relied on descriptions provided by prisoners.

This heterogeneity has enriched the works, while allowing the artist to place her subjects at a distance without having to sacrifice her humanity. The images remain generic, but the explicit materiality and mixed aesthetic of the maquettes suggest the real fragility – or derision (because humour is not absent) – of the manual intervention involved. ⁴ The two latest series were built up around another instrument (also fundamental) of control over the world, namely speech, and its corollary, writing. "Photography is mute", recalls the artist Marc Pataut. "It lacks speech. And speech is a way of working outside photography. It is also a way of bringing in the body (sculpture) – a way of recovering its use, and reclaiming it."⁵ It is this reality of bodies, this otherness, that reintroduces, obversely, the slogans of Du fric ou boum, and the Stammheim prisoners' descriptions of their cells. Over the course of time, and with the advent of the economic crisis, the social spaces that Ballandras has explored since Transfert d'activités (workplaces, precarious accommodation, prisons) have become coercive, "substractive", in that they subject the body to the violence of privation (that of security, privacy, etc.), or to a dispossession of the self. The Red Army Faction produced a considerable amount of theory on places of confinement and their physical or perceptive repercussions. ⁶ The drawings, paintings and sculptures of Sentimentale Intellektuelle focus perception on the visual elements that signify this situation: latches, bolts, spyholes, hatches, bars, reinforced doors, etc. This, like other works, shows us places of radical retrenchment (whether prison, factory or tent) which, by extension, question the positioning of art, and the space it occupies, constructs and holds.

Fabienne Ballandras shares with artists such as Sophie Ristelhueber, Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand and Bruno Serralongue an ability to grapple with reality in its conflicts and history. Her protocols and formal dispositions "give back to images their capacity for political insight and invocation"⁷, while bringing about a displacement of perception and the body, in the kind of salutary deviation that art can still make possible.