Silence in the darkness

Abstract

Between the main thoroughfares on the outskirts of cities, a whole natural fabric is trying to protect itself from annihilation. Many of these places, deserted spaces in unoccupied industrial zones, are excluded — off-screen, out of frame. It's a landscape turned upside down, part of an uncultivated nature that has become an obsolete, dilapidated, backward and almost savage vestige in the midst of urban civilisation. In the photographic series Silence in the darkness, the image takes space as its object, and it is the soul of the soulless place that is staged. The photographs represent a photographic non-place; images of an anonymous territory, a buffer zone, an alternative, an intermediate or intercalary space, of extreme banality, on the fringes of metropolises. Industrial wastelands, made up of wasteland and deserted roads, represent real sharing zones where immobility and absence reign. Transitional and functional places, but also places of wandering, in suspense. Between reality and fiction, between social reality and poetic imagination, between documentary and fiction. From then on, these places no longer belong to cities, from which they are excluded, victims of the modernity that runs through them today. They have become anachronistic ruins, marred by the delay in their evolution over time, symbolising the complexity of these places. The photographs question the very status of these indeterminate, forgotten zones, waiting spaces where silence reigns; time seems suspended, amplifying the immobility of the atmosphere. What emerges from these images are uncertain, unconscious spaces that seem to emerge from nowhere; veritable wastelands, deprived of any human presence. Concrete and wooded areas, lit by the orange light of streetlamps on a winter's night. The different colours that explore the nuances of the urban atmosphere, from the oasis of light from the sodium vapour streetlights, create a livid, discoloured universe, between dusk, nightfall and darkness, where the trees end up becoming silhouettes. A heavy atmosphere in this luminous environment, which ends up plunging the viewer into a space of anxiety, immersed in an oppressive sensation. The sense of unease is heightened by the atmosphere of pale light, a veritable flood of public lighting. These flooded environments, almost irradiated by the orange glow of the streetlights, form a space apart, mystical and magical, but also funereal, austere and sinister, provoking a certain disquiet, a feeling of strangeness, in a destabilising universe. Faced with these photographic images, we are prey to a number of reactions to what we are seeing, to what we are feeling; we are trying to give a sense of place, a meaning to all these places on the margins, these wastelands, these in-between places with an ambiguous status. In fact, to understand it, to uncover its hidden enigmas, to wrest its secrets from it.