F o r g o t t e n L a n d s
– Ten Years in the Mountains –
France, Spain, Italy, Canada | 2012 - 2022
─ There is something ineffable emanating from the wild atmospheres of the high altitudes. ─
Vaporous feelings mingle: fascination, anguish, humility. An omnipresent eerieness awakens buried instincts in us, bringing our mind back to the stage of a fearful contemplation in the face of the brute forces that seem to inhabit these immensities. It is from this introspective state of consciousness that "Forgotten Lands" – "Terres Perdues" in its original French title – drew its roots ten years ago. With pictorial and cinematographic influences, the concept is also to tell a story in each image; bringing together fragments of unsuspected visions with the idea of evoking a primitive world, prior to the Anthropocene. For this purpose, the most tormented elements act as a revealer, exacerbating the wild presence that reigns in this vertical universe.
Vaporous feelings mingle: fascination, anguish, humility. An omnipresent eerieness awakens buried instincts in us, bringing our mind back to the stage of a fearful contemplation in the face of the brute forces that seem to inhabit these immensities. It is from this introspective state of consciousness that "Forgotten Lands" – "Terres Perdues" in its original French title – drew its roots ten years ago. With pictorial and cinematographic influences, the concept is also to tell a story in each image; bringing together fragments of unsuspected visions with the idea of evoking a primitive world, prior to the Anthropocene. For this purpose, the most tormented elements act as a revealer, exacerbating the wild presence that reigns in this vertical universe.
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"This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man, we say, — so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, — not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we."
Henry David Thoreau - Ktaadn
