François-Xavier Gbré summons the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. From colonial remains to landscapes redefined by current events, he explores territories and revisits history.

For the past fifteen years or so, he has been photographing the imprints of human activity on the landscape and architecture of the African continent. In 2023, as part of the Latitudes support program developed by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, he set out to follow the railway that runs from north to south through Côte d’Ivoire. Connecting Abidjan to Niger. Built in the former French West Africa (AOF), the line was once used to transport raw materials from Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Niger for extractive purposes, as well as to carry passengers. Today, it remains active but is reserved solely for freight. The small stations, typical of colonial modernist architecture, and certain sections of track have now been abandoned: the lush vegetation of the regions they pass through has gradually infiltrated them, invading waiting rooms, hangars, and dilapidated ballast beds.

Gbré’s photographs are infused with a kind of latent historicity made up of multiple overlapping temporal layers: the colonial period, the post-Independence years, and more recent events.

Radio Ballast is the title of the project. Radio refers to the device that transmits information, while ballast is the bed of crushed rock on which the rails lie. In railway jargon, the term also refers to rumors of uncertain origin: vague, unfounded news, a mixture of assumptions and gossip, interwoven and often contradictory narratives. It’s easier to imagine that such rumors come from the tracks themselves. History often resembles such a rumor. It is never simple, but rather diverse, entangled, or refracted. It falls to the artist to propose forms of synthesis. That is precisely what François-Xavier Gbré sought to represent here.

This series is accompanied by a text by Clément Chéroux, director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, an essay by Sandrine Colard, photography historian and professor at Rutgers University-Newark (United States), and an unpublished short story by writer Gauz'.

Published on the occasion of the 2025/26 exhibition at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris and 2026 exhibition at International Center of Photography, New York