I started to work with photography, I guess at a very young age, more as a hobby, and then what I was really interested about is to see how I can compose an image, an image that is flat within the image.
There are so many layers that I can compose decompose recompose disrupt, and there are many perspectives that I can work on.
So I think that's my real main interest because it's an never ending question.
I'm trying to work on that through various techniques and it's a very, very large subject.
And I guess I started to be interested in photography very long time ago because it's a medium that allows me to work within nature, within a real landscape, but where I can bring a part of construction, a part of an abstraction as well as a part of reality, and I can play with both.
In my work for many years.
I like to see what is our relationship with the landscape and with nature in general.
How we look at a land and how we observe it and how we can interpret it.
I used to work on, when I was working on a series called The Observatoires, for example, I was working on the beach and I had to work with the tides as well, so I had to follow a very tight schedule, working with the tides and their movements and I like to have those constraints as well, because I think the constraints help me to build the work as well.
And, for example, I was looking at what we call history of science.
So history of science is really how, throughout the years, from the Antiquity, Middle Ages Renaissance, etc.
We, the savants and the natural philosophers, as we used to call them, and then the scientists looked at the land, observed it and then gave hypotheses on how they thought the world was made of.
And to me it's a very, very fertile ground because I read about history of science of the planet, history of science of the sky, and then those for many years.
Those readings have helped me to build sort of foundation on which I can build upon all the projects.
It is so fertile and inspiring, also because it's a science of observation, and my work is also how I can translate that into a form of materiality and then into a film or a photograph or an installation or performance.
For me, moving from the photograph to the film was a very important step, because I guess my first film, my first video, was in 2019 with Below the Deep South.
I have done some videos before, but they were different with.
They were small performances, they were not backdrops.
But I think for me this moment was very important because I wanted to bring choreography to the movement of the backdrops.
So the backdrops I found a way to activate the backdrops from outside of the frame.
So, for example, I tried with a film called Below the Deep South.
We printed lots of different backdrops with different stratas and we brought into.
We brought into fire.
We work on a project for six months in the studio, as I explained before, with finding the idea, the concept, the scientific foundation, and then finding the right material idea that can click with it.
And then once we arrive there, we need to find a way to produce it.
And sometimes it's very complicated technically.
So when we arrive there, it's six months to a year.
And then we prepare the shoot, we set it up, we create, we print all the backdrops, we cut them.
That takes hours and hours.
Everything is set up.
And then we have 15 minutes.
And that's what we have.
And then it's over.
So there is an extreme point of tension when we start the film because we can't get it wrong.
So Below the Deep South is about the very strong sedimentation of the power of sedimentation of the inside of the planet.
So when you have landscapes that are so, if you think of the tectonic plates, they are moving like a plate on floating.
But they're also colliding and there are many strata that mingle with each other.
So for example, if you think of coal, what is coal or fossil energy?
Coal is made of mainly tropical jungle or tropical nature.
I mean the most precious coal, because it's the one that has been filled with the sun and moist.
It goes um it, for example, a part of the nature, part of a jungle that is on the equator.
It goes, then it moves slowly, then it goes into the ground, and then it moves slowly and then arrive, you know, deep into the ground.
And this, the heat of the ground, has been sedimentated the nature, those leaves and those trees for many millions, millions of years, and this creates fossil energy, because this is, you know, extremely rich and dense, and then that's why you can drill in Antarctica and then, if you drill further down enough, you'll find some, you know, ancient jungles.
And to me it was amazing to think that a land that can be made of so many different strata of time and that the heat of the planet was also a force of tranquil energy that was kind of acting while we were living on the surface.
I want the viewer to be able to somehow understand what we have been through in order to build a landscape, that is, an installation that is in the photograph or in the film.
So that's why I always leave the paper a rope.
You can see sometimes the tripods and you can see a little bit of the construction, but not too much, otherwise you can't delve into it if you see too many details.
So it's always finding the right balance to me.
It embodies the human figure, because if you see a tape or if you see a piece of rope, you can see that somebody has been there building it.
So you can't fully delve into it the same way as if you would see a landscape that has nothing artificial, in a way.
It's almost like it's embedding the human's translation of it.
It's quite a peculiar way of working, I think, because there are so many things that could be done on post-production or on Photoshop so quickly now.
But somehow to me it's really important that the work is an excuse to leave a moment with a team that is also a common creative moment.
That's where I find a big part of the beauty of a practice is really in the form of experimentation, and I want that to transpires into and to be seen somehow in, you know, in the final results and the accidents, the Sometimes things go.
When we are in a shoot, for example, and something goes wrong, we are like oh, that's the only thing we'll.
You know, maybe the film won't be usable because this happened.
And then when you watch it again, you realize that this makes the film.
That's always like that.
It's those unpredicted things.
For months and months, we work on something on one moment.
And then that's always... exterior things that happen that makes the work magic or not, you know?
In this film called The Story of Fixity, which is the Art and Jewel commission.
What you can see is about 15 minutes.
Three films of 15 minutes.
When you put the three films together, they can almost create one very long film.
And it's one landscape.
It's a fixed plan of one landscape that is going from night to day to colour.
I mean to sort of whiten a night again.
So it's almost creating a diurn, so day-night cycle, with the quality of its pigment changing.
So what I did is I worked with four different scenes, and when I put them, one after the other, that's how the films are created.
What we did is we have a backdrop, a daytime backdrop, and we put a blue paint, a very dark blue paint, on it, so it looks like it's night time.
And in the film, at the top outside of the frame, we put water on it.
So when you put, When you put the water, the paint, the dark blue paint falls and then suddenly you can see the daytime.
So it's almost like the night is leaking to let the day appear.
So that's the first scene.
And then the same thing happens between the day and extra light day, so almost like a washed version of itself.
If you look at a landscape that has too much light, you get blinded by it and it gets almost like it's washed out.
So that's where we arrived and in this state.
And then we moved to the colour version of this same landscape.
So it's always raining and always leaking.
And the rain brings back, you know, washes away the ink, but then it also brings back afterwards another landscape.
And what I did is for this project.
I worked on specific techniques that I found in order to have a sort of reverse.
So it's an optical trick.
We filmed the backdrops in one of the scenes upside down and we played them reverse.
So the water, in post-production, we turned them back to normal and we played them reverse.
So the water is coming from the ceiling, but instead of washing away, it brings back the decor because it's in reverse.
And this was a way to go from one scene to another.
The way I build my backdrops and images is that because they are never about a specific place.
I like to take pictures in different places of the world when I travel, or sometimes by accident, and then I have an archive and I build my backdrops with this archive.
So it's a mix between different places, and that allows me not to put my subject into one specific geographical area, because it's not about when it is or where it is, but it's more about what this place does to you and also what kind of more universal philosophical question an image can offer you.
And somehow it's difficult with photography, because it's the first thing that you think of when you see a landscape.
You want to know where it is.
You want to know, because photography is attached to its location and because that's where the medium is offering you know, and the same for film.
And I'm really trying not to... It's not important to me and it's not about that.
I love to work with, for example, I love to work with jungles and with tropical areas.
The reason why I love to work with those areas is because they belong to the tropical belt, which is all around the world.
So there is something quite universal about those kind of landscapes.
So in the series called Phoenix, I was working at night in a palm grove area.
What we did at first is we set up the lights, and I did a recce before I chose those specific places before.
But then when we arrived at the time of the shoot, we set up all the lights and we set up a desk with we have a truck.
In the truck we have the big printer that came from my studio in Paris and we brought a big table, and so all that in the middle of the nature.
It's a little lab.
We take a photograph of the landscape and then we bring it into the computer and then we print it with a large printer.
And we only printed slices of this photograph, and then we cut them and we moved them top right, left down, and then what I do is I reconstruct an image between the back of the real landscape and then with the photograph that is placed right in front of the camera.
So of course, in this whole process, I can't move the camera.
The camera is fixed, and it's really fixed with weight.
Because if it moves, then it'll destroy the whole process.
And then we have a wooden frame and we clip those strips of paper.
And then I create an image that is partly the real landscape and partly the paper backdrops of the same landscape at the back.
So that allows me to create a land that is a weaving of its own version, a weaving of itself.
I have been working on another subject which is called paleoclimatology.
Paleoclimatology is, in a way, the same kind of problematic issue around the planet and time, but seen through a different angle, because this time is seen through contemporary scientists who are looking at the past of the planet.
So, in other words, we live in a landscape that we have the very fixed relief of, and within this landscape.
How did we arrive to that?
What happened?
We know the planet is 4.5 billion years old.
What happened on the planet until now to create the landscape that we have now?
And they look at the status of the past within the landscape.
They look at pollens at the bottom of lakes.
They study the ice in the Antarctica.
They have many, many different ways of looking at the past and they put everything together into models and then that's how they can talk about the past, and they can talk about quite precisely what happened when the planet was filled with ice a billion years ago, or when a meteorite hit the Gulf of Mexico at some point, or or how, at some point, all the plants ate each other because there were too many, or all those big moments.
They're starting to be more and more precise.
Obviously, there are gaps.
But to me what is fascinating is that it's also a science of observation and of translation and it's a science of bringing proofs together, also between different parts of science.
And to me, learning about that, it's also a way to look at the landscape with a very, very different eye, because through the eyes of the paleoclimatologist you can suddenly look at the world as, first of all, as a moving entity, which is extremely important to me because when I read about that I realized that I saw The planet has a completely fixed entity with borders, what you learn in school, which is a map,
You have a globe and you look at it and it's how it used to be and how it will be, with with the same water everywhere and the same land and obviously on a human scale of time.
This is that even if the land is moving all the time, it's not fast enough, but it's also very human, centralized way, anthropocentralized way of looking at the world.
And I think it's interesting to unfocus that.
And suddenly, if you sort of take a distance away from that perspective, you can see the world, the planet, as an entity that is extremely fluid, you know in a constant movement, and we are part of this movement, of course.
I don't want to talk in my work directly about climate change, because it's definitely not about that.
It's more about a larger version of our relationship with the land.
I don't want to focus on that because I think that would be too narrow.
I think for me it's interesting to.
That's also why working with paleoclimatology is amazing, because then you can really take a step back, back back, and look at all those movements and looking at us within a much larger history.
And there are still places in the world that are getting fragmented.
So, for example, I did a work called Grand Vite which was presented at the Pompidou Center part of the Prix Marcel Duchamp last year, in 2024.
And this work was about how, in Africa, there is what we called the Great African Rift, which is a crack in the landscape which is literally crossing Africa from north to south, in East Africa.
And the scientists call it the beginning of an ocean.
So it's literally a fissure that is open.
It's very alive and vibrant and the seismologists can they have seismographs on the ground and it's still very active and it's slowly slowly, slowly getting separated and eventually there'll be a sea and then an ocean there.
So to me it's fascinating to think of the land as a force, and as a force that obviously we can't control, because in this particular example it's a force that is coming from the bottom, the inside of the earth.
It's heating and it's very strong, so that's how it pushes both territories away.
Looking at those examples, it's a way to explore, a re-exploration of the world through the scope of those of the past.
So it's almost a sort of translation between the past, the present and the future as well, because when you're a paleoclimatologist, you learn about the past in order to talk about the future, because the question of time is also very fluid.
Also because those scales of time are gigantic.
We are very small into this very long discourse.
And I think what I love about this subject as well in many ways is that it's...
It brings a form of universality, suddenly the borders and suddenly the continents.
When you look at maps of how the world was 250 million years ago, it's just so different.
And then, I guess, the questions of our frontiers.
You can't really, you know, recognise where France is, or you know it's completely.
It's a puzzle that keeps on moving.
And suddenly it's all well, like it's the same floor, it's the same water, it's the same material, but it's just vertiginous and very large.
You know to think of how it used to be.
Even if it was a long time ago, it still did happen.
And to me it's just, you know, it's just how, now in my studio, when I bring back all this information, I have a time where I read a lot and I try to see.
I also try to see beyond those research, because the research is the grounding.
And then I have a moment of of digestion and then I go back in the studio and then I start to work with the materiality.
So, for example, if I want to work on Grand Vite, for example, this film, I try to see how I can make a backdrop explode or how I can make it transposed, like very quickly, in a very violent, brutal way.
So I tried lots of different things and then suddenly it might work and I might find something.
Or sometimes the materiality or the research, the testing in the studio brings me somewhere else, to another research, another article that I've read that I didn't even think of.
And then that's how I bring things together.
So my process of research is very.
I realize that it's a bit too complex, but I haven't found so far another way of working.
For example, if I want to talk about a subject that really interests me, I go back to my studio and I try to work on this, try to find a way to develop this project.
Very often it doesn't click.
And what clicks is another accident that happens in the studio.
We try lots of different things and we end up with something that we never thought would work.
And then another article, another research that I've read and that stayed in the back of my mind but that I never thought I would work on at first.
And then those two things click and that's my project.
I don't know why, when we test things in the studio, it's a little bit like a scientific lab.
Sometimes you never know what you're going to find until you do it, and that takes a lot of time, and that's also what i like about the project and that's what i like about my.
My job i work is to is to be able to um, to be surprised, you know, to be surprised in the studio and to to with the team, the people that i work with, that we, we find things together.
It's a very communal project.
And I like that.
Sometimes I would find it almost strange if I find an idea and I ask a constructor can you find a way to do this and that?
And I come back and it would be done.
That never happens.
It's always an expedition in the process of the making.
Through my research, I started to be extremely touched about how we think of the planet Earth as being ours, like it belongs to humanity and it has always been and it will always be.
And it's through this research somehow I really saw it as two different things, because the planet has been without humanity for so many years and maybe in the future
There is a care to our planet, but mainly there is a care about our humanity and our ecosystems.
Because what we are doing is not the planet will obviously recover from one way to another.
What we're destroying and changing is our ecosystem that is so precious and so beautiful when you think about it.
Um, every species.
There are so many, so many, so many species that have been there for so long and that are always adapting changing um, and this is so precious and so, and it's so precious because that's the ecosystem, the only ecosystem we can live in.
If this gets um disconnected, then the world won't be ours anymore.
So I think that's what we need to cherish.
And it's very fragile.
And I think the ecosystem is different than the planet.
After reading so many examples of how the world used to be filled with ice, for example, covered with ice, or covered with water, or with huge volcanism, with black dust and night for days and days and years, obviously we wouldn't be able to live on those ecosystems.
This was not our story.
Our story is now.
