I ORIENTAL RHIZOME. A Tavel in ex-USSR

PHILIPPE HERBET I

> from March 12 to April 27 2008

Biography (in French only)

Philippe herbet personal site, here

À la russe!

Anastassia Sergueïevna Gorlanova was my maternal
grandmother, I called her Baba Nastia, “ à la russe ”.
Thanks to the dubious relationships that my father had with the
Soviets, I was able to spend three summers with her, from
1976 to 1978, in Moscow and in Crimea. Leonid Brejnev was
celebrating his seventieth birthday in 1976, my grandmother
her fifty-ninth. She died after a long illness four years later
and we could not attend her funeral. The noose had tightened
further.
As for my grandfather, he had been deported to Kazakhstan at
the end of the Thirties, just after the birth of their daughter
Maria, who was to become my mother.
I was born in Istanbul of a Belgian father and of the beautiful
Maria, a girl working in a bar in Beyoglu. This «accident»
caused my mother to live in Belgium and to break off with her
past.
I was tempted to search for the memories I was lacking from
those first two years of my life spent at the Sublime Porte and
of this grandmother of whom I knew little.
And it was in Istanbul that I boarded an ancient Ukrainian cargo
ship to cross the Black Sea. Once in Odessa, I wanted to discover
the Ukraine, Russia, Byelorussia and Kazakhstan, the scenery
and the theatre of one half of my origins, of my Eastern
rhizome.
Therefore I followed those too pretty Russian women from
Istanbul who reminded me of my mother in the Sixties, of her
make-up, of her short skirts and of her stiletto heels.
I travelled “à la russe”, on ships, on trains, in “Gazelle” —
the attractive name given to minibuses in that part of the
world — and even hitch-hiking. Russia started to vibrate
within myself in the key that has since accompanied the
rhythm of my existence: the minor key.

Philippe Herbet

Philippe Herbet est représenté en Belgique par la Galerie
Jacques Cerami, Charleroi et en France par la Galerie
Camera Obscura, Paris.

Published for the exhibition: Philippe Herbet,
“Rhizome oriental - Voyage en ex-URSS”,
Brussels, Husson Publisher, in French and English
18 x 22 cm, 128 pages - Texts and photographs:
Philippe Herbet - Price: 28 €.