Didier Ben Loulou captures his territory's chafed epidermis, where the living and mineral vibrate with the same heat. Reality perpetually eludes us. Man is one with, in communion with matter, blends with it. Wrinkles, cracks, graffiti and folds echo one another, are part of the same respiration, of the same temporal submission. The topical, the present, the instant resides within this geography. In this momentary disquiet, beneath the grooves and veins, we make out the intense tension of a living body.

Yet his is not a detached approach - which Jerusalem wouldn't tolerate. For the photographer, 'there is no question of neutrality, of detachment but of face-to-face confrontation with no possible escape' The place screams its violence: an old man seemingly imploring the sky, stones placed on tombs (a funerary offering referring to stoning), a knife in a child's open hand, associating both offering and murder. The violence is first of all sacrificial, but although part of ritual's order it always extends beyond it. 'We are in a place of permanent sacrifice, a place of profanation', the artist observes. Burning rubbish becomes a purifying fire. The intense red of a ball of wool suggests blood. We see beyond the image.

The aim of this quest, which one could describe as on tological, is to recover the origin. Didier Ben Loulou undertakes a reappropriation, a reoccupation of a place, rendered necessary by the excessive ascendancy of the symbolic, ideological and political. It is an archaeological undertaking. People are no longer the same, nor is the world, yet nothing is lost. Here and now, in the fleeting present, can be read the echo of a sacred, perpetually rediscoverable foundation.