Pavillon Fantôme

Pavillon Fantôme is an intimate and fragmented visual journal initiated after a sudden loss of 80% of my hearing in my left ear. The images explore what remains when sound disappears — a perception shaped by silence, dissonance, and gradual readjustment.

I initiated this photographic work in January 2024 while I was at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris. A short time earlier, I had learned that I had lost 80% of my hearing in my left ear, most likely as the result of a virus and an overreaction of my immune system. This revelation marked the beginning of a photographic dialogue with a profoundly altered sensory reality.

Over the following five months, I returned regularly to the hospital for treatment, navigating between moments of hopelessness and glimmers of improvement. My camera gradually became a witness to this passage, capturing not the events themselves but their inner resonances. Each image emerged from the growing understanding that my relationship to my surroundings — and to others — would never be the same again.

This photographic series unfolds as a visual diary: deliberately fragile and introspective. It reflects my now singular perception of interactions with the environment, a new sensory cartography in which familiar sounds are transformed into unknown territories. Red naturally imposed itself within my visual vocabulary, evoking the low frequencies I predominantly lost. The colour became a guiding thread in an aesthetic of absence, where what is missing paradoxically acquires an intense visual presence.

The photographic language of this work is shaped by the different stages of this personal journey — from hearing loss to the gradual acceptance of a new everyday life marked by discomfort, dissonance, and heightened sensitivity to noise. The title Pavillon Fantôme (“Phantom Pavilion”) crystallises the project’s central duality. It refers both to the outer ear (pavillon de l’oreille) and to Pavilion IV of Lariboisière Hospital, where this story unfolded. The word phantom evokes something spectral within hearing loss itself: a presence-absence that now quietly haunts each moment.