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Holding Hills

Photographs series (2018—on going)

Japan

“Poetry is an instantaneous metaphysics. A poetic image astonishes us, strikes us with its intensity. It immediately transports us into a reality that surpasses our everyday experience”

Gaston Bachelard “The Poetics of Space” (1957)

During my first trip to Japan, I came face-to-face with a gridded concrete wall. In an almost utopian gesture, it attempted to hold back a weakened hillside. This mass of concrete, enveloping the threatened slope, sculpted the vastness of its curves, forever fixing the fluidity of its movements. Japanese natural landscapes abound with these grayish meshes, both semi-organic and semi-petrified, often invisible when they are swallowed up by nature that takes its right back. I call them “holding hills.” Like allegories of our unstable world that we wish to crystallize, these hills, which we strive to reinforce to prevent their collapse, fascinate for their graphic appearance and for what they reveal about our societies.