François-Xavier Gbré Brings “Radio Ballast” to ICP, Tracing Côte d’Ivoire’s Rail Lines as Living History
A railroad can look like pure infrastructure — steel, gravel, timetable — until an artist treats it as an archive.
That premise sits at the center of “Radio Ballast,” a new body of work by French-Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré (b. 1978), now making its US debut at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. The photographs are presented in a two-person exhibition alongside fellow Ivorian Nuits Balnéaires, in a show curated by David Campany, ICP’s creative director.
Gbré has long described his practice as a way of addressing what official narratives leave out. “What I try to do with my work is to fill the many gaps in history, and to tell history in different ways,” he said in a recent video call. For an artist attentive to how memory is carried across generations — and how much of that transmission remains oral in many African contexts — photography becomes a form of writing. “This story needs to be written,” he added. “And it could be written with words, but also with pictures.”
In “Radio Ballast,” the “story” is Côte d’Ivoire’s railroad system, built more than a century ago by French colonizers to transport extracted natural minerals to the port of Abidjan. The subject is also personal: Gbré’s grandfather worked on the railway, and the artist has maintained a lifelong fascination with trains. The resulting images carry a quiet poignancy, balancing the intimacy of family memory with the larger machinery of colonial economics.
The project’s origins reach back to the early 2010s, when Gbré was living in Mali near a train station. That proximity sharpened his attention to railways as both a daily presence and a historical force. Beginning in 2024, he spent about a year photographing the line and its surrounding terrain from the north of Côte d’Ivoire down to the south, using the route as a way to interrogate the country’s intertwined histories of colonization, independence, and modernity.
The title “Radio Ballast” points in two directions at once: toward stories that circulate without being formally recorded, and toward the crushed rock ballast that supports the tracks themselves. In other words, the work is as much about what lies beneath as what is visible.
Gbré’s lens lingers on the built environment shaped by the railway’s passage. “I’ve been looking at the new industry. At the villages that became cities thanks to the trains,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the first train stations built more than one century ago.” He also tracks architectural shifts after independence, noting that Côte d’Ivoire’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, pushed to modernize key sites, including stations, as part of a broader reimagining of Abidjan.
Making the photographs was not straightforward. Some railroad workers were wary of being documented, in part because they did not know Gbré or the aims of the project. Access ultimately came with help from Françoise Remarck, Côte d’Ivoire’s Minister of Culture, who had encountered Gbré’s work in Abidjan and at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
For Campany, the series demonstrates how a contemporary image can function as a historical instrument. He described Gbré as an artist who represents “the past in a political sense, but also in a kind of economic and cultural sense,” adding that Gbré approaches photography “almost like a kind of archaeology” — a method for turning the present into a portal through which the past can be reconsidered.
Gbré’s path to that method was indirect. Born in Lille, France, in 1978, he did not initially plan to become a photographer. After breaking his shoulder while playing football, he was invited by a friend to spend time in a photo lab — an encounter that redirected his attention. He began photographing his hometown in black and white in 2000, then left biochemistry studies to train at the École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques in Montpellier from 2000 to 2002.
Early professional experience in Milan assisting photographers working across fashion, beauty, design, landscape, and architecture helped clarify his interests. He gravitated toward landscape and architecture in particular, drawn by a longstanding love of buildings and the way they register political ambition over time. By 2007, he had formally committed to those subjects as the core of his practice.
At ICP, “Radio Ballast” extends that commitment into a charged terrain: the railway as both a physical corridor and a historical argument. In Gbré’s hands, stations, tracks, and the spaces around them become evidence — not only of what was built, but of what was extracted, modernized, renamed, and remembered.
