Photographic serie

Edition,  Décor journal

2018
🏡  ENSP-Olympus Award, Rencontre de la Photographie, Arles

2020 
🏡  Publication in the Décor journal, Ensad

Transfiguration

This project is an attempt to depict a certain urban relationship to nature in the Anthropocene—through a relativization of humanity’s place and impact on the fauna and flora that surround it. This inquiry can be illuminated through the notion of transfiguration: the passage from substance to figure; from nature’s materiality to its symbolization through the medium of the image.

The appearance of floral motifs on construction tarpaulins is particularly symptomatic of one aspect of our contemporary relationship to nature: the use of an image of nature understood as a pure symbol. Its presence in the city is therefore largely confined to a decorative function, a notion that points to the artificiality of these visual tropes—flatness, collage, and surreal cut-outs bordering on absurdity. That these natural motifs come to illustrate construction-site tarpaulins is also highly symbolic: such works materialize transition, the destruction of a past in order to shape what is to come.

Project initiated by Thomas Vauthier as an extension of his Kyoto Survey project, later joined by Fanny Terno within the Disconoma duo.