BACAB
Mayan civilization has evaporated keeping its mysteries. The veracity of his prophecies also remains ambiguous.
However, there had existed a work which fuels the assumptions: The Popol Wuh, the "Book of the Community" or even "Book of the Council". It is a sort of a mayan "Bible" whose content, dating back to the pre-Columbian era, relates the origin of the world and more particularly of the Quiché people, one of the many mayan ethnic communities, whose center of influence was located in the western part of present-day Guatemala.
Mayan traditions being surely transmitted orally, some researchers concluded that the writing of this book did not date from the pre-Columbian era but rather from 1554, that is to say about thirty years since the arrival of the Spaniards in Central America.
How should we study something when we doubt its origins?
Only evidence and physical traces can justify its progress. And if it is impossible for me to write the last chapter, I have been able to testify to its current state of being.
This series of photographs explores the vestiges of a civilization which, without disappearing, continued to irradiate entire countries with its codes and knowledge.
Do its heirs find their place in actual society?
Enclosed in the center of the American balance, the ancient Mayan territory is today open to all influences: the Pan-American highway is their main vein.
These photos are in a way an inventory of the situation of people who, subject to the passage of time and the excesses of a globalized society, have managed to survive in the environment, however hostile, of their ancestors.
There more than elsewhere, traditions and modernism face each other. The authenticity of what lends itself to be seen is then questionable.
Signs, symbols, forms and representations linked to the Mayan culture have never ceased to evolve, inspiring some to continue to perpetuate it. And sadly, despite the steady decline of native Central American populations, only signs and symbols persist.
Lignes Communes
A point. A series of points.
Then a line.
As man sculpts the world around him, he leaves behind evidence of his existence in this basic form. A form that surrounds us, a form that sometimes overwhelms us.
This series of photographs seeks the harmony of lines, in order to extract the beauty from the banal and the symmetry from what was once unintended.
Commuters
India is a country of contrasts, on each scale : human, geographical, or also spiritual. My approach is different. The study of inhabitants habits and behavior forced me to step back and to get out of this machine which, at the first sight, never stops and waits for none. However, this mechanism works as it worked for ever, thanks to his pace and his peace.
Population growth, fragile dynamism of agriculture, extreme weakness of infrastructure, conservation of traditional social structures and poverty resulting of these elements' combination are the cause of a major rural exodus. Learning to live together, is a non-sense question in India. In town, people adopt the same lifestyle, and the commuting phenomenon has never been more obvious. While leaving the countryside for the city alters habits, finding his family after each working day is unwavering.
Monday to Sunday, at fixed hours, the streets, shops and public places come alive and emptied. The sounds and smells are fading, neutral neons supersede natural light. Only animals, invisible and forgotten the day (re)conquer their territory. Such a wheel to this gearing, they occupy squared wards, and, I guess, also have their habits.
Main counter of « La Compagnie des Indes », I lingered in Pondicherry, day and night, to make these photographs. Its unique architecture inherited from the mix of identities that have succeeded in its walls, and its multifaceted colonial past. Almost invisible from days, lost in the daily tumult, monuments are both emblems of Tamil and French heritage and landmarks for each passerby. Irradiated by this same white light, they are frozen and appear to be the last remnants of a deserted city, where dogs make a new law. The contrast is so strong, that to accept such a change of state becomes a memory game.
PVNRT
For ever, water has been a scarce and precious utility. It isn't by chance that the downpour myth was born in Mesopotamia, a region where the liquid element was central and was the source of all wealth, hence its sacredness to the living and the dead people.
But its benefits don't let the people forget that they are, at the same time, subject to the whims of two great rivers and of the powerful nature. Men fear drought and the violence of rains and storms that cause, especially during the spring, violent and excessive flash floods. Their waters swollen by snowmelt, the Tigris and Euphrates suddenly overflowing their banks, drowning the valleys, destroying harvests and causing countless damage. By ruining crops, the water appears as the instrument of divine justice.
To temper the excesses of angry Gods and moderate the devastating flood, men struggle to control the rivers by building dikes and canals. They dig wells to supply the water table, shall adjust complex networks of ditches and reservoirs to collect rainwater and irrigate crops. They put all these achievements under the protective deities of Water, and they try to ensure benevolence by prayers and offerings.
Many decades later, men are still trying to tame the uncontrollable. Today, when speaking of water, few people would evoke the divine fate, but more of them rationally use Science to understand its changes, History to predict its future and wit to try to understand and control its behavior.
Water enhances reality by its reflection, creates movements from the extreme random to the predicted geometry, justified by chemistry and physics laws, and is a perfect medium to freeze the human footprint.
This series of photographs evokes both the indomitable energy of the water, the way human appropriates and tries to control this foreign and strange element; and the beauty that water flows may cause intentionally or by chance.
