Fractal Spaces is a body of photographs of peri-urban landscapes mounted on mirrors, exploring the disorientation of our relationship with nature and industry in the capitalocene era. Most of the images were taken at the end of the winter of 2016 in the Rhône Valley, the most industrialised region in France, during a residency at Moly Sabata, Albert Gleizes Foundation, at the invitation of Le Creux de l’enfer contemporary art center. The viewpoints – through budding tree branches – suggest that these images talk less about ruin than about mutation.

The Fractal Spaces landscapes mimic the established codes of topographic photography in order to subvert them: industrial parks, suburban housing and commercial developments are captured from a distance, under a neutral grey sky and without human figures. These contemporary stereotypes are reinterpreted through two forms of superposition.

The first one, the curtain of trees in front of the built-up background, reverses the perspective: it is not, as in the usual topographic photography, an altered nature that is being observed by man, but rather nature that is watching over threatened industrial spaces. A non-anthropocentric point of view questioning deindustrialization, and landscape mutations generated by a network economy in which we relate to the world through tree-like fractal structures.

At the post-production phase, a second effect is introduced by the mounting of transparent prints on mirror. The reflection of the vegetation and architecture in the mirror’s shading, on different planes, invites a reading that is more specular than documentary. The pieces are activated by the viewer, who is invited to situate himself in relation to the images and the reality they reflect. It is thus an attempt to blur the divide between nature and culture, viewer and landscape, subject and object.