Sanctuaries

From former Eastern Europe steel combines to Guadeloupian distilleries of rum, from decayed Mexican haciendas to remains of abandoned Soviet cities, I have repeatedly photographed what appears to me as sanctuaries of life and work.

Since my abstract and digital flyovers until some long exploratives wanderings, I experiment like an initiatory journey that will make me taste alternatively the vacuum and full of these phantasmagoric places.

The vacuum that resonates with every step.
The full of these lives that I like to imagine, these ghosts released from labour who make doors slam and windows beat.

Overcome by the sepulchral peace that reigns in these places, we should walk slowly, silently, looking for a beauty simple and naked, reinterpreting these confusing feelings of abandonment, loneliness and oblivion that are more or less consciously part of us.

We should know how to experiment these spaces, breathe them, explore them silently, religiously, crossing them like a shadow, pricking up our ears to perceive the echo of a hacksaw, the grindings of the baskets of a « room of the hanged », the vaporous trace left by the murmurs of a faithful, the bursts of laughter of a child.

Industrial cathedrals became profane tombs. How can we not see in those silent architectures the poeticy of places mistreated by time, nor charms of wrinkles that so many years of neglect dug there?

Photographing these patinas, these crumbling, these traces left by water and heat from the sun, all open windows and abandoned roofs, is like dialoguing with time, feel the history and the soul of these places. Everything is there to say it was powerful, or hot, or rude, or collective.

Maybe then should those orphan architectures reveal to you an alternative picture : that of these men and women, left in silence or in the clamor of conflicts, but who sometimes, as to survive these places, have left behind a light on.