Toujours Diane (Forever Diane)

Toujours Diane is the invention of a world where the sun never sets. Hiding in the shade, dreaming or sleeping would be a form of resistance.

How do you live in a burnt-out world?

Into the world of Toujours Diane the light is not always warm, soft or comforting, as it is at the end of August, but sometimes aggressive and dazzling.

Toujours Diane takes as its starting point the Russian astronomy project Znamia, which at the end of the 1990s was supposed to put an end to the night thanks to satellites capable of reflecting sunlight during the night. The series began with collective research into sleep as the last intimate and political space.

Toujours Diane is a mixture of my own black & white photographs, taken with film that has no anti-halation coating, from the astronomy archives of the Paris Observatory (with their permission) and photos of eyes that suffer from light or fatigue.

These images are accompanied by a text without punctuation written by myself and a video (Somnolences) that runs on a loop, showing faces that no longer know how to take a nap.

This project won the Fisheye Prize for Visual Creation.