Camargue, 2025

Camargue, 2025 extends the series of places through an intimate return to a foundational landscape. Walking, repetition, and fragile images activate memory as continuity, where past and present coexist within a sustained, attentive gaze.

Camargue, 2025 unfolds within the continuity of the series of places, while occupying a singular position inside it. The work follows the same logic of return and revisitation, the same attention to spaces crossed and inhabited over time, yet it anchors itself in a more intimate territory, shaped by childhood and familial transmission.

Born into a French family settled in Lugano, the regular return to the south formed a ritual. Camargue, Arles, and their surroundings constituted a familiar landscape, associated with repeated gestures, slow rhythms, and a soft, diffuse melancholy, without rupture or the experience of exile. Returning today extends this continuity, approached from an adult, displaced, attentive gaze.

The walk moves through beaches, roads, cemeteries, open stretches of land, and modest architectures. The territory reveals itself in fragments and layers, weaving together early memories and present perception. As in the other place-based series, space operates as a meta-place: a site shaped by affect, projection, and repetition rather than description.

The series adopts a deliberately fragile economy. Rudimentary cameras, holiday images, and expired films form an unstable material embraced as a method. This choice generates a constant temporal drift. The past surfaces without fixing itself; memory circulates through color shifts, light, imprecision, and the wear of the image itself.

One image stands apart within the series: Camargue, 1986–2025. A postcard placed on the sand shows a child on the same beach, photographed by my parents in 1986 and reinserted into the present landscape. The gesture collapses time into a single surface. The child appears fully absorbed in the act of emptying the sea, a useless action carried out with extreme seriousness. This performative and almost ritual gesture becomes foundational. It affirms a relationship to the world grounded in attention, repetition, and belief in the act itself. Re-staging this image today anchors the entire series. It marks a return not only to a place, but to an original posture toward time, effort, and meaning.

Camargue, 2025 thus reaffirms a point of origin within the broader work on places. While the series appears more intimate, it remains fully connected to the whole: a foundational site revisited after the fact, where gestures, rhythms, and movements central to the entire corpus crystallize. Returning here means holding a point, maintaining continuity, and accompanying time without arresting it.