SOLASTALGIE

The future has become a worrying horizon. It is the base of that project: the transformation that took place in my relationship to the world, the crumbling of a serene vision of the future, the appearance of anguish no longer as a revelation of my intimate flaws but as a threat to the “extime”: the territory the world, what surrounds me and seemed immutable…Rather than only limiting my project to a factual enumeration of the causes of this crisis (pollution, global warming, social and migratory crises, etc.), and rather than only invoking major concepts, such as the Anthropocene, for example, I have chosen to focus on the intimate dimension of such a horizon. How am I affected by this perspective and, above all, how does it already influence my daily life in discrete ways? In order to do this, I decided to use a fragmented, complex visual language, which at the same time shows certain factual aspects (the snow that melts in February in the Alps, for example), and others that are intimate or close to my daily life (my family…). But it seemed essential to me to integrate a philosophical dimension into this project, to question our relationship to what surrounds us and to try to thematise the violence of our relationship to our environment. That is the reason why I try to made images that show a different relationship to the environment (because the landscape in its artistic form often refers to an idealized form of the territory I am trying to question). Finally, some of the more ambiguous photographs recall my own contradictions and literally stage the violence of my way of using the resources that surround me. That project is therefore made up of a core documentary photographs regularly balanced by more allegorical images that allow the representation to be shifted towards philosophical and personal dimensions. The aim is to make the questions raised by science more intimate, to make this shift towards the sensitive and to participate in a concert of voices that I personally feel is necessary.

Mattieu Gafsou