Images from a summer night wandering in the Camargue.
On the edge of town and country, on the verge of clairvoyance and intoxication, photographs are extended to the limits of their own materiality...
Chemin de fer project, which could be litteraly translated with a double meaning ‘flatplan’ and ‘railway”, is like filmstills extracted from a movie of a hallucinated wandering. Snapshots are taken during one night in Arles, the 8th of August in 2012, carried by encounters, precarious equilibrium with the surrounding environment (elements, objects, friends and animals). The digital camera and the flash were used as a prosthesis to see in the dark, with its technological limits (sharpness and exposure). These images brings a stratified post-viewing, which calls to mind this particular relation between the concept of intuition associated with the visible. Both mystical and dialectical, this relationship is made of many coincidences and disjunctive associations.
The night was sleepless, but not white (same sense in French). Thanks to the technologies of the digital images, capacities of the human seeing are improved. If the space of the visible is tiny at night, the space of the sensible becomes immense here. The camera is no longer passive but generates its own images: in full framing or in detail (glitch, slag, stains, mosquitoes ...), shapes and colors meet each other. The hierarchical order is canceled, everything is made of the same texture of points, ... a memory.
Chemin de fer series is a sequential game, which adapts to the medium formats of shows. He has declined in a slideshow (The smell of dust project 2014), project of exhibition (nominated for Prix Levallois 2016) and a book in collaboration with Païen (Nuit blanche, May 2018). Qualities of these media become an asset rather than a constraint to experiment the sequence of sequences, create répétitions, new connections by crops and cuts.
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Images extraites d’une errance nocturne en Camargue. À la limite de la ville et de la campagne, à la limite de la clairvoyance et de l'hallucination, les photographies sont poussées dans les retranchements de leur matérialité.
La série Chemin de fer est un jeu séquentiel qui s’adapte au format de diffusion. Il s’est jusqu’alors décliné en diaporama - projet international (The smell of dust, 2015) et en journal imprimé (Prix Levallois, 2016). Les qualités propres de ces médias deviennent un atout plus qu’une contrainte pour expérimenter ces fragments d'images et leurs enchainements, créer des césures, des répétitions, des séquences.