Closer

“My work revolves around the question of the connection between individuals and spaces. For this residency at the Friche Belle de Mai, I took interest in the youth who comes to the brownfield site. They are the first ones we see when we enter it; they are an important part of its identity. In this series, I wanted to approach the site of the Friche as a social space, place of life and blending. The diversity of the installations drains, in a same enclosure, various public, some of which meet only very rarely. These different worlds do not necessarily have direct interactions; however, they share a space where both integrate the daily landscape of each. The young people who posed for my photos grew up with the internet. They have always been exposed to an indistinct mass of images. They are themselves producers of images. Through social networks, they have become accustomed to go through a photographic staging in their relationships to each other.

In each of my photographs, my models are given a fabric and an image as accessories. The fabrics are often very colourful, sometimes flashy, imitating the codes of luxury. These are fabrics from the popular apparatus. The images inserted in the stagings are photographs, either taken from the internet, or from the artist Torbjorn Rodland, whose work plays on this ambiguity between googlisation of icons and works of art. Generally, quite indifferent to these accessories, models have however agreed to pose with them, in order to achieve a public image. In this series, I photographed young people from the Friche, staged inside the brownfield site. The device focuses on these young people whose relationship to images is all at once rich and complex. It is not, strictly speaking, to portray them, but rather to question the way in which they represent themselves, and what they agree to show to others.