Old New World

A project carried out during the Covid-19 lockdown in Paris (March-May 2020) to showcase the limits of our relationship to the natural world, a world that had reached its limits, and our hope for a better future. I chose to represent this particular time with medium format film consisting of a black and white emulsion layered on Gampi Japanese paper, showing a fine texture due to the flower and mulberry tree fibers that it is made of. The looks of the images, as if found in a distant future, aged and damaged and coming from the past, is a way to blur the temporality of what is “old” and what is “new” as in the “New World” that we are hoping to see emerge after this crisis.

In order to further undo any time references, I use a narrative inspired by the supernatural and the codes of anticipation novels, characteristic of times worried by dystopian futures (1984 – G. Orwell, Brave New World – A. Huxley, La nuit des temps – R. Barjavel). Those back and forths between reality and fiction, past and future, suggest the hope for indefinite or disturbing prospects, without any possibility for a logical way to influence them. I deliberately look for those shifts in point of view in order to amplify the symbolic of the moment we are witnessing. By doing so, I wish to foster thinking beyond the sole images shown, and beyond the moment in which they are being looked at.