photographic assignment


-ANGES

For the exhibition Imaginer Servais (2022-2023), I was invited by the Centre National de la Littérature to create thirty installations: one for each year of the Prix Servais. Thirty books, thirty worlds, thirty visual interpretations.

This work responds to Tombeau des Anges by Gilles Ortlieb, a text that lingers in overlooked towns, in quiet gestures, in what remains when the noise is gone. I travelled to the french villages around the luxembourgish border that end in -ange: places shaped by the rise and fall of the metal industry. Once thriving, now stilled.

I photographed these villages and presented the images as postcards, a gesture both sincere and slightly ironic. These are not places people usually send greetings from. But they carry something worth pausing for: façades touched by time, windows half open, traces of life persisting in the stillness.

It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about attention. Like Ortlieb, I tried to stay with what is, without rushing past, without turning away.