Alternatives Landscape

I think that photography doesn’t represent reality, but creates it. In this project, a concrete form is integrated to the landscape and paradoxically gives to the image a surreal aspect. The whole thing is done in an empirical way, and is guided by a formal research both obsessive and demanding. My approach towards landscape is to incorporate a poetical component that will trigger an emotional response linked to the form and the light. I wanted to create something that wasn’t really a landscape but rather something engineered, so as to move the viewer in a different way. I experimented with this method in many locations and this global perspective, the presence of a complete series of images, adds weight to this artificial form that lights up, subdues and transforms the original landscape. I was interested in the introduction of a man-made object in an outdoor setting, a luminous square, a human element that forms a relationship with nature and helps it to be reborn. From this I feel a kind of poetry blossoms, linked to the presence of this regular shape, like a recurrent canvas that symbolically references creation, the blank page, the empty space that needs to be inhabited. This series germinated in my head during the Christmas season 2011. I pictured myself hanging out decorations in weird places. My first experiment was a string of 100 Christmas lights of one metre square. I started shooting this light installation in the nearby forest, and I realised that I would use this method to investigate the notion of landscape. I later changed the installation into a light plastic square, 1x1m per 5cm, holding 300 LED lights linked to a dimmer. I hang it using fishing lines tied to trees. The exposure times for these images vary from 30 seconds to 4 minutes.