SANCTUAIRE

Sanctuaire is a photographic project about the pilgrimage to Lourdes and the supernatural apparition of the Virgin Mary. Questioning visible and invisible, it reveals the hallucinatory vision of a humanity torn between its fragility and its hope.

From Lourdes, we know the penitent and sick pilgrims, the Hail Marys that punctuate the day and the temple merchants that make it France's second-largest tourist town. There is tension between the clerical institution, the secular world and the town's commercial economy. But the faithful from the four corners of the world are clearly looking for something else. Something immaterial and absolute to oppose suffering and fear.

At the start of this project, I asked myself this question: through photography, how can I look at what I can't see? And then very quickly, as I was walking around Lourdes and wondering about the supernatural vision of the Virgin Mary appearing to Bernadette Soubirous: is the disappearance of reality the condition for its appearance? For if mystics speak to us in terms of union, ecstasy, joy, and a state of knowledge of the world that would be entirely interior, it is because when the essence of things appears to them, the reality that we share disappears entirely. This is the basis of a vision. So, since I'm not a mystic, how can I make what I don't see appear?

With this question in mind - what is a supernatural vision, and how can it be translated photographically into an image that invites us to move our gaze - I have developed a process for shooting and diverting the image that follows in the footsteps of the formal experiments carried out since the origins of photography by spiritual photographers and then by the pictorialists, and is based on the intersection of several interventions - analogue, digital and plastic - that I carry out until the medium is exhausted. In this way, I seek to provoke a mystery at the junction of randomness and erasure. To get close enough to what only photography could capture here in Lourdes: the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of reality. Or, at least, if any photographic attempt to reveal the invisible is impossible: the hallucinatory vision of humanity caught between its fragility and its hope.