Dreamers is an experimental video-photographic project that combines the production of digital images with documentary images from the media. Each image in the series is made up of the following elements: the decor of a bedroom, one or more sleeping characters, and the drapery of bed linen, made using computer-generated images in a photorealistic manner. Within these virtual environments, photographic images from the news are broadcast. In its conception, this project articulates two levels of physical simulation, that of the fabrics and their folds facing the characters’ bodies, and that of the luminous fluxes that illuminate the scene like a projector, breaking down the photographic image that makes it visible.

Two scales are mixed, that of the intimate, personal story of sleeping bodies, and that of “History”. This contrast is rich in meaning, the bedroom becoming a projection space involving the sleeping characters facing the events that are happening, which emerge as a form of historical unconscious. This also allows to initiate a game with baroque aesthetics and its formal questions (from the aesthetics of the fold to that of illusion that we find in a contemporary way in simulation) and philosophical when events and life are considered from the angle of the dream. Between intimate portraits and documentary images, the modalities of representation of these two types of images confront each other to form a space in between open to interpretation. What has the appearance of a banal scene (the sleeping characters) is the fruit of a complex simulation, and conversely the phantasmagorical projections are images of the world. The virtual human figures give a disturbing strangeness to these scenes by throwing a disorder between the animate and the inanimate as well as between the virtual and the reality.

​

This broadcasting device results in the production of horizontal images in 4:3 format that imitate a traditional photographic shot by adopting the operation of a classic camera, the sensitivity of the film at a focal length allowing to play on the depth of field, as well as short vertical videos in 9:16 format on the model of the ephemeral story of social networks. These videos imitate the movement of someone holding a mobile phone and filming the sleeping character by using the visual codes of this type of image: trembling of the shot, noise of the digital sensor, etc. A soundtrack of background air and breathing is also added. While users share fragments of their daily lives in the manner of a paradoxically public diary, the artistic project infiltrates this type of flow by playing on the unease created by the voyeur's point of view adopted to create an effect of distancing within this social practice. The disappearance of the videos after a day also evokes the way in which dreams gradually disappear from our memory.​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

Furthermore, this project questions the way in which news images shape our perception of "reality" and events, it highlights the way in which they are part of a collective imagination, which they contribute to socially construct, which they perpetuate. Here, these images become dystopian, and reality emerges as a disturbing fiction on dreamers, a way of indicating how much the flow of news images keeps us in a specific imagination (by the choice of events and their presentation), constructed in a political and ideological manner. Indeed, cut off from their captions and the particular events to which they refer, these images bear witness to recurring forms and themes. The aim here is to affirm that there is a media imagination, a visual culture of news, and that these elements have an influence, conscious or not, on our imagination.

​

This device also questions the particular “objectivity” associated with photography, recalling that every image is already a construction from reality, which produces a Brechtian distancing effect from the images that we know to be informative images, broadcast in the media, by transfiguring them in this new space of visibility that gives them a disturbing strangeness. It is paradoxically about renewing and enriching the view of reality by derealizing it, and being able to initiate a critical and political reflection on the view from a poetic vision open to interpretation, as are dreams.​

​

The project was shown as a projection where the videos are triggered intermittently for a few seconds in the space after long pauses without images in the exhibition AfterImage: The Third Terrain, curated by Todd Molinari and Häsler Gómez, which was held in the artist run space After/Time from November 12, 2022 to January 13, 2023 in Portland (United States). Visible from outside the gallery through a bay window, the choice was made to continue to broadcast the projection at night so that passers-by could witness the untimely triggering of a video in the closed gallery. During the exhibition period, the videos were also posted ephemerally as stories on social networks.

​

​

​​
​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​​

​

​

​

​

It was also shown in the form of a new installation at the Palais de Tokyo during the exhibition defending my thesis; a tablet that seems to be switched off, placed on an unmade white bed, broadcasts videos from the project in an untimely manner.