Old (New) World

A project carried out during the Covid-19 lockdown in Paris, March-May 2020. By working with medium format film consisting of a black and white emulsion layered on Japanese paper, I wanted to question the temporality of what is “old” and what is “new” as in the New World that everyone was expecting to emerge after the Covid crisis. More specifically, I aimed to blur the boundaries between past and future, by providing a vision of a futuristic Paris, our “new normal”, as if those images had been found in a distant future, aged and damaged as if coming from the past.

During my wanderings through an empty Paris, I photographed landscapes, landmarks, and made portraits of some of the passersby. I wanted to emphasize places that had this conflicting time dimension, or where nature and man could potentially collide. This vision of Paris is to me a symbol that I use to depict our relationship to the natural world and our growing disconnection from it.