As in each of my projects, whether they concern worlds in crisis or familiar realities, I choose to focus above all on people, their experiences and their circumstances. Here,by invitation to a residency from Images Singulières, in the Cévennes, in France, identities, ages and stories intersect. Some have been here for a long time, while others, sometimes called ‘neo’, are determined to start a new life, both dreamt of and grounded in reality. But all seem to be living a choice, as determined to reject the model of society that is being imposed on us as they are to imagine another, in a form that resembles them and often brings them together. The refuge is not a retreat, it opens up and welcomes.
As I explore the territory and the landscapes that shape it, I document convictions and beliefs through my photography, without embellishment or aestheticisation.
Each encounter is based on a principle of fairness: listening and sharing who we are, what we are experiencing or what we have experienced. These encounters with stories are sometimes simple, sometimes hard, sometimes fragile too. All of them, however, are marked by a sense of attachment and a desire to be passed on.
Human revelation operates in the same way as these valleys and villages which, at dawn, slowly reveal themselves through the mist. Like these endless rows of trees which, between earth and sky, escape our gaze to breathe new life into our perceptions. Like, at the summit, these seas of clouds which envelop us in a veil of beauty.
This beauty, which everyone agrees on, seems to know no end, so much so that as I travelled through the Cévennes, I finally stopped wondering where its boundaries lay. To each their own, whether geographical, geological, intimate, imaginary or poetic. We are here, in a deep and nourishing relationship with the land, with nature, with people. With life itself.
I try to intertwine the vertigo of immensity with the quest for the infinitesimal. Alongside this park ranger, who meticulously surveys the landscapes and forests to better protect them, and attempts to preserve a moss threatened by too much light (in this case, buxbaumia*), I humbly recognises what also moves me deeply: the need to be and to observe as closely as possible, of course, but also and above all the conviction that attention and care for detail, for the tiny, the rare, the particular, allows us to better understand what is universal to us all.
* Buxbaumia viridis: a drought-sensitive moss species, green buxmaumia colonises mixed mountain forests and shady coniferous forests with humid air.
