Carnoux-en-Provence, town of south of France, was created ex-nihilo in the 1960s by the French repatriate from Morocco and Algeria.
I have always found beautiful its flat-roofed villas, its buildings and shop inspired by exoticism and modern style.
A recent restructuring project of his downtown has initiated the refurbishment or even the destruction of several buildings. I wanted to capture their facade before they disappears.
These photographs are obviously an act of memory of the urbanism and the architecture of the city. By repositioning these buildings in the Saharan desert, I also wanted to represent the Maghreb that still haunts the memories and the dreams of these « pieds-noirs ». By representing what the inhabitants hide in their heart, an insatiable desire joins up the act of seeing the invisible.
The ubuquitous modernity, concept on which all representations of the beauty are based on the new and the clean and upon which is built the urban renewal, is represented by the usage of Pantone ® Color of the Year for the sky. The usage of these design references to illustrate all shades of the sky reports the conformism and the uniformity of our modern world.
The excessive frontality of their facades forces us to rethink how we are watching them: such a frame is unreal since so stepping back is not possible. Barring capturing the reality of the world, the only thing left to do is to imagine its essence: the visible is empty of life but beyond appearances is living, behind the facades without perspective, a lifefull secret .
Born from the assembly of thousands of straightened and manipulated images, the monumental size of these photographies (more than 3 meter long) gives them an absolute objectivity from which we can not lose any detail. This manufacturing of the image deludes, in an invisible process, our perception of the reality.
