Fensch

"As a child, I thought the world didn't exist, that I was making it up as I went along. In very early childhood, thought-images, real, imaginary and dreamed, became one. From this age, I kept an influential and contrasting memory, mixed with danger, fear, emptiness but above all with raw joy, immeasurable energy ...

And then, little by little, the images of the adults took up more and more space until they covered mine. This transition to the age of reason is a loss: today, conscious access to the original thought-images definitely escapes me. It gives me a stable, more or less coherent world on which to build the experience of my identity, of others and of the world. Adult, what remains of these images without language and what influences do they have?

I decided to explore this idea right next to my home, in a major iron and steel site in Lorraine: the Fensch valley. I chose this place because it is loaded with emblematic images of our collective memory: the city-factories that spit and cough, an era that has not been dreaming for a long time and also its nickname, the valley of the angels , a country “where the name of the towns ends with… angel” as Lavilliers sings. Yet the people I met there modestly cover reality - the valley, its noises, the thick air and the ubiquity of factories - with fond memories of a bygone era.

I wanted the resulting photographic fiction to let us slide into an intermediate, multi-layered universe, halfway between reality and the telluric and liquid depths of memories. It talks about the balances we create to move from a blessed time… to reality. And thus prepares us to face the world. "

Claire Jolin