toujours diane (forever diane)

toujours diane is a world where the sun never sets, and where the light is aggressive and dazzling. Finding refuge in the shade, sleeping, dreaming... are all gestures of withdrawal that make resistance possible.

toujours diane is the invention of a world where the sun never sets. This light is not always warm, soft or comforting, as it is at the end of August, but sometimes aggressive and dazzling. Sleeping, finding refuge in the shade, falling into dreams - these are all forms of resistance.

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, initiated by Eloïse Vo.

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 (which I can translate into English) and a video (Somnolences) that runs on a loop, showing faces that no longer know how to take a nap.

toujours diane won the Fisheye Prize for Visual Creation in 2023, it was exhibited at the Galerie Fisheye in Arles and published in the pages of the magazine.

To find out more, you can watch the Focus Fisheye Magazine video.