ANGES
Imaginer Servais – After “Tombeau des Anges” by Gilles Ortlieb
For the exhibition Imaginer Servais, 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. Inspired by Ortlieb’s gaze, I turned mine to the villages around Luxembourg 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.
