Courbefy sold at auction for €520,000 to Ahae, who has yet to say what he intends to do with abandoned Limousin hamlet

It was the village no one wanted: an abandoned hamlet of 21 buildings including the ruins of a 13th century castle, a chapel, an empty swimming pool, overgrown tennis courts and falling down stables in the unspoilt central region of Limousin.

But on Monday the ghost village of Courbefy, 30 miles from Limoges, went under the hammer for a second time and was bought by an American photographer.

The buyer, a South Korean-born artist whose name is Ahae, was not present for the auction in which he made the final bid at €520,000, nearly €200,000 more than the asking price.

Paul Gerardin, a lawyer for the French bank credit Agricole, which repossessed Courbefy when its previous owners went broke, said there were two other bidders, a Belgian and an Irishman who wanted to use the village for a reality TV show.

Courbefy first went under the auctioneer's hammer in February, but failed to attract a single bid. At the time Jean-Pierre Chateau, who lives nearby, told Le Figaro newspaper that it was "heartbreaking" to see the place abandoned. He said it once had a unique atmosphere with "village festivals held right up until the 1960s".

Chateau said villagers, most of whom were farmers, began moving out in the 1970s. In the 1990s there was an attempt to turn Courbefy into a holiday village, complete with hotels and restaurants, but the expensive plan was eventually abandoned in 2008. Since then Courbefy has been left to nature and, according to Le Figaro, abandoned to thieves and squatters.

Ahae, based in New York, specialises in landscape photography and has an exhibition at the Louvre next month. He has not said what he intends to do with the village 280 miles south-west of Paris.

Bruce Wayne participates in the conceptual photography assignment

Julian de Courcy participates in the conceptual photography assignment

Watch behind the scenes at Sotheby's as they prepare for a dazzling auction of art owned by dashing millionaire collector Gunter Sachs

Healers and tricksters, shape-shifters and spirit guides, transgressors and transvestites – two exhibitions in Paris send the Guardian art critic into a spiral of panic

In every encounter, you confront yourself first of all, your openness and your resistance. There's always a little voice in your head providing a running commentary. Some critics, recording this invisible guide's comments as they go, scribble their way through exhibitions. It is a surprise they see anything at all. I try to ignore my invisible little friend, the smart-assed creep on my shoulder. But if that doesn't work, there's always exorcism.

We were standing at a voodoo altar, curator Jean de Loisy, anthropologist Bertrand Hell and me. There were just a couple of pots on the floor, each containing a huge, multicoloured, waxy, fat-congealed mound of stuff. There might have been some chicken in there, and what looked like jawbones, of what I couldn't tell. It had been sitting under the gallery lights for a couple of weeks. Yum.

"What this thing needs to activate it is strong alcohol!" De Loisy exclaimed, and picked up a bottle of gin from beside the pots, giving the mounds a liberal sprinkling then taking a swig himself. These are the sorts of spirits I like, but he didn't pass the bottle. For a moment, nothing discernible happened. No voodoo, no who-do. The sorcerer from Togo who concocted the altar goes by the name of Azé Kokovivina, Sorcerer of the Giggles. Maybe that's where the gin comes in.

Suddenly I wasn't laughing, but plunged into a world of spirits, demons and creatures from the netherworld. Annette Messager's clothes flew about the room, powered by electric fans. A tiny carved Peruvian shaman, part baby, part boxer, and no bigger than my hand, took up a fighting stance. A medieval St Michael slew a demon, Joseph Beuys gave a lecture to a dead hare and Picasso transformed himself into a faun. A figure with a head like a dunce's cap gave me the eye, and what looked like a sock turned into a cuttlefish. Ancient beings of remarkable ferocity stalked my way and Sri Lankan masks gurned and yowled.

In the Garden of Addiction, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus's tangle of glass tubes, like so many evil flowers, proffered the scents of opium, cocaine, skunk and booze. Various modern-day witches and healers discussed their craft on a tower of TV screens. It was like watching a dozen cookery channels at once.

Cultures, eons, continents flew by. We were among the forces of chaos and disorder: healers and tricksters, shape-shifters and spirit guides, transgressors and transvestites. Housed in a mock-up cave of aluminium struts, wallboard and plaster-soaked scrim, the exhibition Les Maîtres du Désordre (Masters of Chaos) is an exercise in wild curating at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

De Loisy has always been a bit of a maverick curator. Here, he has brought together a bewildering selection of artefacts, sculptures, costumes, masks and objects from past and present, and from every continent. Beautiful, tender objects collide with the monstrous and the devilish. Much of it has extraordinary power and vitality. Among it all are a number of more modern, western artworks – from Picasso to Paul McCarthy – as if to show the persistence of the transgressive and the search for hidden meaning in the world. Beuys, a latter-day shaman, thought he could heal the postwar world with his art. Randy old goat Picasso was a shape-shifter and trickster.

Other recent artists – Jonathan Meese, the Chapman Brothers, Russia's Oleg Kulik being led around on a chain and behaving like a mad dog – are just tricky. But if you want to be an artist, you've got to believe in something. The trouble with most contemporary art in this context is that little of it, if any, is the product of a shared belief system that glues the world, and the self, together. If there are no rules, there's nothing to transgress.

The exhibition's title is taken from Bertrand Hell's book Possession and Shamanism, yet to be translated into English. Masters of Chaos is also the culmination of De Loisy's own 20-year obsession with the subject. His previous curatorial projects have included exhibitions on beauty, on the face, and, in 2008, Traces of the Sacred, a tour of the persistence of the sacred in 20th- and 21st-century art. He also collaborated with Anish Kapoor and James Turrell and, after working at the Centre Pompidou, went sailing around the world for a number of years. He is a man in search of something. He has also recently been appointed director of the newly renovated Palais de Tokyo, just across the Seine, where the Paris Triennale is currently on view – the launch show in the expanded, renovated building.

The two exhibitions share an interest in the ethnographic, in cultural difference and transcultural proximity, but could not be more different in approach. De Loisy is passionate about objects. The Triennale, which goes by the title Intense Proximity, is much more cautious about the readings we might make of the vast corpus of paintings and sculpture, films and video installations, photographs and drawings brought together by guest curator Okwui Enwezor. De Loisy's show is a thematic romp. Enwezor's triennale admits to the difficulties of finding order and meaning in the world. The triennale is a trial for any spectator. I wandered like a lost tourist. One minute, you're in the Venezuelan jungle, the next at a mixed-race wedding in the new South Africa. One minute, I'm staring at the most intimate body parts of an Amsterdam sex-worker, the next watching a TV documentary about a talent contest for migrant Filipinos in Tel Aviv.

I twirl along to north African beats and stare at a group of closed and silent grand pianos. Here are Claude Levi-Strauss's notebook drawings and a great new painting by Chris Ofili; over there are some gorgeous black-and-white photographs of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian dock life in the 1940s. On a screen, blacked-up (now that really does seem transgressive), the young French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar dances among a group of her own sculptures, in homage to Josephine Baker.

The day before my shimmy with the shamans, I'd spent almost five hours here and was still reeling. Enwezor, who directed Documenta 11 in 2002 and is now running the Haus der Kunst in Munich, has a very different take on art and ethnography to De Loisy. He sees a link between the ethnographer and the artist, ethnography and curating.

Intense Proximity focuses on this: the link between the close and the distant, the near and the far. It confronts us with the world's disjunctions. With so many cultural differences and competing interests in an ever-shrinking world, how do we even begin to make sense of it all? Is art a kind of news from elsewhere (whether a geographical place or a somewhere in the artist's mind), or a report from the close-to-home? Both exhibition catalogues quote the ironic opening phrase of Levi-Strauss's marvellous 1955 book Tristes Tropiques: "I hate travelling and explorers". The idea of exploration has changed immeasurably since the days of 19th-century colonial empire, and as much again since Levi-Strauss's first trip to Brazil in 1935. Bertrand Hell told me how little travelling French ethnographers and anthropologists undertake nowadays.

On the other hand, today's curators, and even critics, are always on the move. Enwezor admits to a kind of intellectual vertigo and spatial disorientation. Descending into the bowels of the Palais de Tokyo, I knew what he meant. It has hidden depths, basements leading to sub-basements, subterranean mezzanines and floors, traversed by ramps and open, curving staircases. Films are screened in rediscovered auditoria that had been walled up for decades, and in side rooms branching from dizzying Piranesian shafts. The place seems to go on for ever, and so does the triennale. When I described my journey through the triennale to De Loisy, he said he likes the idea of people getting lost in these basements. I like being lost, too. But this journey is accompanied by growing panic.

I'm bought up short by a sign that reads: "I am not exotic I am exhausted." How can anyone deal with all this stuff? The urge to see everything leads to the frustration of not seeing anything, of always being driven on to the next thing without absorbing the last. It is a flight that becomes ever more urgent, ever more futile. If it is an encounter with anything, it is with competing urges: the voice on the shoulder jockeying me on, and a desire for it all to stop. It is an encounter with the chaos of the world.

• Masters of Chaos is at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, until 29 July

• Intense Proximity: La Triennale 2012 is at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until 26 August

A selection of the best images from around the world

Photographers' Gallery, London

In 1997 Edward Burtynsky had what he now calls his "oil epiphany". Having just filled up his car at a petrol station, it came to him that, as he puts it, "the vast, human-altered landscapes that I pursued and photographed for over 20 years were only made possible by the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine". His work ever since has been about oil: its production, transportation and myriad uses as well as the environmental cost engendered by the same.

Burtynsky's series Oil is a vast undertaking, more than a decade in the making. Alongside Mitch Epstein's equally epic project American Power, it is one of the key visual documents of our time. The book of the same name was published in 2008, and that same year Burtynsky was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Prize, hosted by the Photographers' Gallery. It seems a little odd that the newly refurbished space should revisit that work for its (re-)opening show, but then again if you wanted a big-profile artist making work on a hugely ambitious scale, Burtynsky is an obvious if safe choice.

Oil takes up the top two galleries of the redesigned five-storey space, and the series is divided under three thematic headings: Extraction and Refinement; Transportation and Motor Culture and, most intriguing and ominous of all, The End of Oil.

Like the work of Epstein and other more conceptual practitioners such as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, the book format doesn't really prepare you for the scale and extraordinary detail of these large format images. To give you some idea of the ambition, both formal and technical, of Burtynsky's work you need only look at a photograph entitled Highway #5, Los Angeles, California. Though its dimensions are 1.6 metres by 1.98 metres, it encompasses the vast sprawl of Los Angeles from the complex intersection of freeways in the foreground all the way to the high-rise buildings of the downtown district and beyond to the mountains. The photograph was taken from a tripod-mounted camera in an open-sided helicopter hovering above the freeway, but there is no sign of camera shake here. Indeed, the digitally recorded detail is so extraordinary that you can pick out several McDonald's arches amid the low-rise urban sprawl, as well as the Hollywood sign way off in the hills, everything lit and somehow heightened by the unreal Californian sun.

There are several equally astonishing photographs in the exhibition, the most dramatic being Burtynsky's aerial view of a burning oil pipe on a drilling platform, which is being doused by water hoses in the midst of a vast stretch of water that looks like solidified tarmac. Titled Oil Spill #5, Q4000, Drilling Platform, Gulf of Mexico, 2010, it is perhaps the single most potent image of the environmental fallout of that now infamous manmade ecological disaster. Burtynsky's photographs, though, do not evince an overt political or ecological message. They are documents that suggest a much bigger narrative: our reliance on, and uneasy relationship with, this most valuable of natural resources.

One of the key subtexts here is America's car culture and its semi-mythic resonance in a vast continent where mobility, whatever the ecological cost, is still synonymous with freedom. He captures the vast crowd at the Talladega speedway track and the rows of pristine Harley Davidsons parked outside an open-air Kiss concert, as well as the micro-economy of fast-food joints that has sprung up around a freeway truckstop in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. This is Walker Evans's vernacular roadside America updated for the postmodern age: an overcrowded landscape of signs that is nothing less than a microcosm of an increasingly homogenised – and branded – country.

Most haunting of all is the section entitled The End of Oil. In the darker fourth-floor gallery the images of shipbreaking sites on the beach of Chittagong, Bangladesh, are both beautiful and disturbing. This is where outdated oil tankers come to die, dismantled by hand by an army of low-paid workers who work in often life-threatening conditions. The rusting, umber hulls of the vast ships seem like marooned skyscrapers against the soft light of the setting sun. On the opposite wall another Ballardian landscape shows the shells of old jet planes arranged in rows that stretch off into the desert's horizon. Against the often dramatic images in the upper gallery these photographs seem more elegiac. They hint at the biggest subtext of all in Burtynsky's work: what happens when the oil runs out?

Irish architects O'Donnell and Tuomey have made a success of a physically and financially constrained project

The Photographers' Gallery is a fine work of post-crash architecture. Up until 2008 this was going to be an all-new building, but then a fresh realism imposed itself and the project became one of extending an existing brick and steel warehouse. The architects O'Donnell and Tuomey, helped by the development company Stanhope, had to deliver it for the low construction cost of £3.6m.

So it's simple, using cubic shapes in black-painted render to announce itself in an unexpected fissure off Oxford Street. Inside it delivers the galleries and education spaces that are the main purpose of the project, rooms which have the right kind of light and surfaces, and almost the right kind of proportions, although the constraints of the site make them feel narrow. Most of the architects' imagination has gone into the placing of openings that connect you back to the street outside: on the top floor a large window aligns with a long vista between the buildings opposite, across Oxford Street and beyond.

At ground level the building opens up, with a glass wall wrapping around the corner that links its cafe to a little square outside. Here it's intended to hold outdoor photographic displays: as the best thing about this building is its potential for joining the inner life of the galleries with the city around it, these external shows will be a vital part of its success.

Destruction of the beaches and overfishing has brought drastic environmental consequences to Cape Verde

The beach in Ribeira da Barca, a village in the Cape Verde archipelago off the coast of West Africa, used to be a vast stretch of black, volcanic sand. Kids played football and their fathers hauled in the day's catch in their small, weathered fishing boats.

Today, the sand has gone, collected by local people and sold to build houses to feed the island's construction boom. The locals have no choice – the fish have disappeared, and with them the islanders' livelihoods. The reason for this can be seen bobbing out at sea: giant European trawlers that are legally allowed to fish the waters, according to an EU treaty ratified by the Cape Verdean government, but they often exceed their quotas.

Illegal overfishing alters the ocean's food chain, too. If major predators such as sharks decrease, smaller fish are no longer obliged to live near the coast and move off – out of reach of local boats. The result is that, some days, the local fishermen still trying to make a living come home without a single catch.

Collecting sand is hard, dangerous work. With the beach already harvested of all its sand, men have to wade into the choppy sea and shovel it up from the sea bed. They fill buckets carried by women who must sprint back to shore to avoid being smashed by the breakers, dropping their loads and being cut and bruised. It's illegal, but the authorities seem to turn a blind eye. The pay is poor, too – the truckers who buy the sand sell it on at three times the price.

The destruction of the beaches also has drastic environmental consequences. If the ocean has no physical barrier, seawater contaminates the groundwater with salt and damages crops. Although they are doing it to survive, the Cape Verdeans depleting their beaches of sand are doing more harm than good.

• More information at francescatosarelli.com/galleries/projects/sandgrains

Bob Carlos Clarke was a famous fashion photographer who killed himself six years ago leaving behind his wife Lindsey and their daughter Scarlett, now 20. But, they tell Britt Collins, they have been determined not to let it 'take them to hell'

Sometimes Lindsey Carlos Clarke was so angry with her late husband that she wanted to burn all his work, change her name and disappear. Instead, she opened a gallery and is consumed by keeping the legacy of his "dark genius" burning. "Bob was the most exciting man I ever met. He was wild, dangerous, sexy and out of control," she says, sitting in her immaculate white living room, with its one violet-painted wall, a perfect backdrop for his striking black-and-white photographs. "When we were young in the 70s, before Bob was famous, we made a romantic pact that we'd kill ourselves when we looked too old in the mirror."

Lindsey was never serious, but on 25 March 2006, her husband of 30 years, the celebrated fashion and glamour photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, walked a mile to Barnes station in south-west London and jumped in front of a train. Aged 55, he left behind Lindsey and their teenage daughter, Scarlett. Three weeks earlier, he had checked into the Priory rehab centre – not for the usual celebrity reasons of drugs, drink or exhaustion, but severe clinical depression.

A prolific but troubled provocateur, the Irish-born Bob Carlos Clarke was known for his pictures of rock stars and erotic, sometimes shocking, images of glamorous women. Often referred to as the British Helmut Newton, he shot Dita von Teese in a corset and stilettos, holding knives; Rachel Weisz in an oil-slick rubber catsuit; a naked and pregnant Yasmin Le Bon. But the most extraordinary images were for Marco Pierre White's White Heat, looking like a rock star in his white-hot kitchens.

"Sometimes I can't come to terms with the fact that he's not coming back," says Lindsey, who is in her late 50s. "One of the things that happens to grieving people is they secretly think they're crazy. I have moments when I don't feel sane. I had a terrible desire to set fire to his whole archive and I think: Oh God, is this ever going to go away? The violence of his death was hard to deal with. When the police appeared that afternoon, I knew it was over. Scarlett rushed to the door and burst into tears before anything was even said. I couldn't allow myself to fall apart because I didn't want her to feel she'd lost both parents." 

She stops and looks away, her eyes misting. "It was terrible for Scarlett. That night, she got into bed with me and started rifling through pictures of Bob and me, and asking incredibly searching questions. I told her, 'You can make a decision, you can either let this terrible thing take you to hell or you can let it empower you.'"

For Scarlett, now 20, the pain of losing her father is still raw and she is struggling to make sense of it. "I don't think you ever get over something like that," she says. "I never had anyone close to me die so I hadn't ever had to deal with that sort of grief. There are times when I feel really low, but it comes and goes. It's not something you can control. I'm dealing with it every day and probably will for ever."

She misses him terribly, but never felt abandoned or betrayed as people often do after a loved one kills themself. "I'm just pissed off that I didn't get to hang out with him as an adult," she says without a hint of anger or bitterness. "We would have had a lot of fun. I grew up with someone who would spend a week setting up a prank just for his own amusement and [who] could also be very cruel, so black humour is a big thing in our family. My last memories of Dad are from going to see him on a Sunday night in the Priory and having dinner together."

She knew her father was a wildly unconventional character but was unaware how fragile and unstable he was.

Her mother – who tried to protect Scarlett – had been quietly enduring his erratic behaviour. "It was a long time before I realised Bob wasn't right," Lindsey admits. "When you're used to dealing with someone who's dysfunctional you become dysfunctional yourself. Months before his death, he had successful shows in London and Madrid, but seemed uninterested, distracted and joyless.

"By September 2005, he had begun to behave oddly. He moved into our basement flat and every morning I'd go down and find the front door open. He would go missing and I'd find him in his van, just sitting. I'd say, 'Hello, darling.' And he'd say, 'I don't know what I'm doing.' He became fearful of everything. The doctors said he was psychotic, but who knows?

"The death of our friend [the photographer] Patrick Lichfield was a further blow. He was crushed and said he envied Patrick. When I went to Patrick's memorial in November 2005, Bob was already in the Priory."

Bob and Lindsey met in London in the summer of 1976, when she was working as a model, and she was drawn to his dark humour and playfulness. "The first shoot we did was the pictures on a motorbike for his book Obsession and we became friends."

They were both married and started a heated and obsessive two-year affair before eventually leaving their partners. For a while during the 1980s, they were a golden couple, with a starry circle of friends, from Marco Pierre White to Keith Richards. Flitting around the world for shoots and shows, there were exotic holidays in Mustique, parties with the Rolling Stones.

"Bob was very entertaining, moody and cruel," she says, describing his constant obsessions with models, infidelities and disappearances. All the while Lindsey looked after Bob's business and their daughter. As she said in an interview three years ago: "I told him, 'You can have your girls in your studio but don't ever bring them back here.' The beach house was supposed to be pure as well, but that didn't last long. He said to me, 'I don't enjoy sex unless it's secret.' 

"I felt depressed and asked him to see a therapist and he said, 'But I like being a shit.' I thought about leaving him, but ultimately I had taken it upon myself to be with somebody who was complicated."

As Bob's career took off, and with a baby, Lindsey hoped her husband would be happier. In 1997, five years after Scarlett was born, the couple were married. "I know Bob loved me, but he had a difficult time giving back because he was so damaged and never came to terms with the big, dark mess of his childhood. He couldn't be there for me because he could hardly be there for himself."

Sometime in the late 90s, her husband grew disillusioned with everything. "Nothing was ever good enough for Bob," says Lindsey. "He wanted to be a legend, but he became depressed about his work [partly because people had begun to use digital photography], with himself. He worried about growing old, losing his looks and not being the in-fashion thing. I'd say, 'Don't be silly, we have a beautiful house, another by the sea, a lovely daughter, a studio, money in the bank.'

"I always thought that people who talked about suicide never did it," she says. "We were on holiday in France with [the fashion editor and stylist] Isabella Blow eight years ago. Scarlett adored Isabella and was riveted by her because she brought these boxes of hats. I said to Scarlett one morning, 'Let's take Isabella a cup of tea.'

"We knocked on the door and Isabella said, 'I think I'm going to kill myself.' I just said, 'Let me know either way because I'm setting the table for lunch.' You get exhausted with people."

Toughest, Lindsey says, is letting go of the guilt. "With any suicide, you feel like it's your fault and could have stopped it. Looking back, I feel sad about how vulnerable Bob was."

Scarlett scarcely remembers much about the Saturday afternoon when the police turned up on their doorstop. She was expecting to visit her father that weekend. "I thought he'd been in an accident but I only had to see Mum's face to realise he was dead. I don't even think I cried. I was in shock. Now, when I think back, I feel sad but at the time I didn't know how to react."

Lindsey says their shared sense of black humour kept them afloat. In some ways, she says, she feels detached, as though these events happened to someone else. "I can relive everything in strange little pieces: the police arriving, the fingerprints, the funeral. It has taken me five years to do the headstone."

Lindsey's terraced house – light, airy and full of glittering objects – is virtually a shrine to Bob, his photographs on the walls and stacks of his books on every surface. "It's been hard letting go – I still haven't."

Lindsey may not have moved on but she is much happier now – last summer she and the professional golfer Andrew Raitt were married.

She shows me a stark black-and-white photograph Scarlett took of her father, when she was only 13, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. "She's multi-talented and has a natural ability to take pictures," says Lindsey.

Scarlett, it seems, has inherited the best of her father.

• Bob Carlos Clarke: One-Offs, a retrospective exhibition, is at the Little Black Gallery, 13a Park Walk, London SW10, from 28 May to 30 June thelittleblackgallery.com