Interrogation on our relationship to the industrial era and its representation, Fractal Spaces is a corpus of photographs of peri- urban landscapes captured from plant cover. After initial tests for the exhibition Disperse at L’attrape-couleurs, in Lyon in 2013, the bulk of the series was developed during a second residency in the Rhône-Alpes region, at Moly-Sabata (Fondation Albert Gleizes), in 2016, at the invitation of Le Creux de l’enfer. The images were taken in the Rhone Valley, the most industrialized region in France. The exhibition «Fractal Factory» at Galerie Binome was the first extensive presentation of the series. It follows the acquisition of a triptych by the FRAC Auvergne in early 2018.
Photographed during the budding season, between winter and spring, the landscapes represented mimic, in order to divert
them, the established codes of territorial photography: factories, industrial zones, low-income housing estates... are represented
at a distance, under a pale sky and without human figures. These stereotypes of contemporary imagery are challenged by two forms of masking.
The first, the intertwining of branches in front of the built-up background, reverses the perspective: it is not, as is usually the case in topographic photography, nature that is altered here, but rather nature that is on the lookout for threatened industrial spaces. It is a question of placing the point of view on the side of the non- human, vegetal or animal. This one questions the current process of deindustrialization, generated in particular by a networked economy in which our relation to the world extends in fractal arborescences.
The second masking is through the technique used: a transparent print mounted on a mirror. The reflection of vegetation and architecture in the sheen, on successive planes, suggests a more specular than documentary reading. The piece is activated by the viewer, invited to situate himself in relation to the landscape in which he is reflected. In the logic of the writings of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, it is thus an attempt to go beyond, in the era of the Anthropocene, the break between nature and culture, viewer and landscape, subject and object.