QUI SÈME LE VENT

There are « good winds », the kind we wish for the traveler who leaves us to take to the road or the sea – gentle and buoyant winds, Zephyrs and Trad winds, which drive you at a a good pace towards your destination, and “bad winds”, whose strength on the Beaufort scale and direction thwart your navigation and can be the cause of storms, shipwrecks and other catastrophes. In Mesopotamian legend, Marduk used one of these winds, called “Imhullu”, to fight and defeat the deity Tiamat. In Odyssey by Homer, Aeolus gives them to Ulysses in a bag, which, once opened, prevents the hero from reaching his island of Ithaca for ten years. Now it is one of those bad winds that blows on certain days over Toulouse and which is called the Autan. With this terrible wind, “enough to decorate the oxen”, the air quickly becomes tepid and feverish, and some say that it makes the lunatics in the Marchant psychiatric hospital “scream”. A wind that gets on your nerves and when it blows the city is under tension; there is electricity in the air and on these days “even the grannies like to fight…”. Moreover, some statisticians have noted an increase in accidents and domestic violence under its influence, and it is even said to have and effect on the number of premature births… As in the field of magic, a distinction must be made between a “white Goshawk” associated with good weather and a “black Goshawk” that brings rain. It is this wind that Leslie Moquin has decided to photograph and study as part of her participation in the Résidence 1+2. But know to make this phenomenon visible other that through its effect?

Dominique Roux