Vittel Promenades
Vittel Promenades is a photographic project about a little town’s banality and strangeness. This town is known for having a very large groundwater table. And the extracted water is very famous in the world but not the town. The overexposed pictures seem to keep the secret : you will just see houses and nature mixed in a weird silence.
There, underneath the earth, a phreatic table full of water. Not as a cave that would host a lake but as a rock mass, waterlogged.
Here, on earth, houses peacefully living on ground, dotting the landscape like if they were swelling their roots of this sacred water.
It’s countryside, but kind of urban, made of cracked concrete by rain and frost, of lamp posts as many full moons, of freshly mowed grass, of villas.
Vittel is a large garden with houses, rich or humble. Neither a city nor a village, it seems to be an apparition, a mirage of built objects in an abundant nature – a little desert where silence is full of birdsongs and muted drama, without plot nor climax. Nothing, or very little, maybe the wind in the trees.
Yet, in the subsoil, that water hidden in a millenary sandstone, captive, still, is dislodged, extracted, brought back to light to be sold.
These pictures of Vittel, overexposed and really bright, like immediately given, seem to resist: except some clues, they don’t reveal nothing about the secret. But something stays latent, like ready to come, to produce a drama, to cause an event.
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That project has been exhibited in My Monkey Gallery in Nancy in 2014 and is exhibited in situ in Vittel since may 2015.
