These days.

Le Grand Cirque is a book written by Pierre Clostermann and tells the story of the second world war. On the pages I've transposed drawings that I made directly with a black stone and a white pencil. Aliens, UFO, black wolves, and moon walkers appear upon the text. The retro-futurist ideology of the seventies are often symbols of the cold war that follow the second world war. The paranormal creatures developed at the same time as the first men steps on the moon were symptoms of the imaginary escapes desperate population could dream of after the horror of the war.

Aliénor.

Astrid

My sister.

Rose Poussière

One day I would like to reach doleful dulness distant from weapon french factories and St Etienne cycle, from the tools counter and the synthesis osteology manual or the funeral'shop windows. While waiting, I copied the roller chains of equestrian games, newspapers,english songs lyrics, old film dialogues, fashion ads, and ribbons where the time, furtively, writes itslef better than in its works. The rest, unfortunately, is from me. Probably.

Aliénor.

Olivia in Roma

Olivia is a chilhood friend. Hum I must say a teenage friend. I met her in the little shoe shop I was working in when I was fourteen years old (I was paid in Marc Jacobs and Pura Lopez!!!). She was my boss'niece. Instantly we made a connection, as far as I remember we were wearing Marc Jacobs pink boots with a green dots dress. When two aliens meet each other it turns into a crazy elixir that is still producing some of my life best memorie.

We went to London in the summer, I got an internship at MTV Europe and she got Topshop. Every morning I dug on the amount of clothes Oliv brought back every evening and took the tube to Camden where I enjoyed preparing interviews for famous bands such as the All American Rejects which I had no idea who they were before.

Olivia is the fruit of a supermodel of the nineties and a famous photographer. This glamour combination of genoas produced a really special human being:a beautiful artist and writer.

Aliénor.

Jana

Jana is one of my brother's friend.

I took her in picture two years ago during the Théoule sunbreak full moon my brother and sister organize in summertime at my parents house in the south of France.

An amazing fifteen days partying and camping out with an average of thirty smart and funny people.

All the pictures are in B&W and I hate myself for having been scared to test colors for so many years... Easy beauty.

I really enjoyed shooting Jana, she is one of these beauties totally unconscious of her natural grace and its grand theft. Was Hippias right when he provided to Socrate his definition of beauty?

HIPPIAS - I understand my dear friend: I am going to explain him what the beauty is. You will notice then, because we must tell the truth, that the beautyn is a beautiful young lady.

Aliénor.

Parallel Occurrences

Graduated!

I'm officially a Master of Global Media

My parents are really really proud of me. I could see the joy in my father's eyes from the podium where I received my diploma. It was if my life has suddenly taken an understandable sense for them, like if they could breathe again, eased of catching a glimpse from a secure life.

Finally, after one year of working myself into the ground to prove to everybody I was able to succeed in 'normal' studies, taking twelve kilos, spending my weekends in librairies and writing a million words thesis...I kind of lost myself between who my circle wanted me to be and who I forced myself to become. I'm not that person with a safe and squared future, I won't ever be her.

This light turn on few weeks ago while I was learning in my module of culture's microeconomy that becoming an artist was the most dangerous decision I could take in my life.

My brain is playing rollercoaster and I suffer from terrible sleepless nights since I took this decision of becoming who I have always been.

Aliénor.

Multitasking with Clouds - Svetlana Boym

For better or for worse, panoramas are dying a slow death, yielding to interfaces and cell phone screens. Once they reigned supreme, framing the rivalry of art, technology, and nature. The word “panorama,” from the Greekpan ("all") horama ("view"), all-encompassing vision, was coined by the Scottish painter Robert Barker in 1792. He built the first panorama house in the world especially for his grand wide-angle paintings of the city made on large cylindrical surfaces. The panorama became an all-encompassing fashion, making its inventor rich and famous. Since then all kinds of “oramas” have proliferated—from cosmoramas to lifeoramas in the nineteenth century to the full-immersion “Cinerama” shown in Universal Studios tours, a forerunner of modern IMAX film-projection technology.

The nineteenth century was the age of panoramas. Daguerre began as a panorama artist and invented photography only after a fire had destroyed his panorama house. Art and technology competed in the public imagination of the new space of modernity. Photography was the next step in the game of illusions. Soon afterward, the train journey became a part of “panoramania” and framed many real-life panoramas. It was never merely about arriving at a destination but also about window-travel. Many works of nineteenth-century literature are framed by the train journey. Its unhurried rhythm inspired strangers to unburden themselves, to think about the meaning of life. We remember how one famous passenger confessed to his accidental neighbor that he might have killed his wife over a Beethoven sonata. And another unfortunate heroine found her end under the wheels of a train, as if punished by the writer himself. Panoramas became victims of their own success and in a peculiar reversal of fortune, from a painting of a landscape they began to refer to the landscape itself. Now when we speak of a “panorama,” we mean nature (often at its most scenic), not the now-obsolete panorama art. Panoramas occupied the space of play between nature and art, and besides the dream of the grand illusion and all-encompassing perspective, they also revealed a horizon of finitude, the limit of human vision. The painter of panoramas strived to create a life-like illusion, always aware of its impossibility. Painting “en plein air” was like trying to square a circle and dwelling on its elusive curves.

From painted panoramas to photographic exposures, from real to fictional train journeys, the road led to the discovery of cinema, which was imagined in a novella by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, The Future Eve, some fifteen years prior to the technological invention. Cinema would borrow the language of panorama (“panning” and “panoramic shots”), and movie houses shared architectural features with old panorama houses and train stations.

The early twentieth century became the age of cinema, which continued its own train travel from the first film by the brothers Lumiere, The Arrival of the Train, to Dziga Vertov’sMan with a Movie Camera. The latter film's hero challenged “bourgeois realism” and jumped on the train tracks, this time not to kill himself but to expand human vision with an under-the-wheels panorama. In a more conventional fashion, many a romance was happily consummated with a train driving into a tunnel and the cheerful words The End written over it.

Yet much of the early cinema was non-narrative. The brothers Lumiere's “archaic” proto-documentary The Arrival of the Train featured non-centered frames with actions taking place chaotically and spontaneously in different parts of the image. This kind of cinema was about narrativity itself and its euphoric potentialities. It allowed the spectator a narrative freedom to play with unpredictable adventures and roads not taken. It depended neither on formulaic plots that would dominate cinema with the introduction of the Hollywood code in the 1930s nor on the carefully calculated interactivity of the new gadgetology.

The industrial landscape was the contemporary of cinema’s golden years. Factories would give jobs to immigrants, and rails would transport them. Rails, not roots, were what mattered. Rails should not turn into roots. Otherwise they bind you to the soil and never let you go. Cinema celebrated industrial construction but also revolutionary destruction, often simultaneously. Thus in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, especially in October, the old monuments would become ruins only to be transformed into new monuments that used some of the same reconstruction and retouching as the old ones.

Later twentieth-century visual art stopped trusting the enlarged renaissance perspective of the panoramas, turning to a more self-reflective and ironic conceptual perspective. It explored virtuality in its original sense, as imagined by Henri Bergson, not Bill Gates. It was the virtuality of human consciousness and creative imagination that evades technological predictability. Yet much of conceptual art was still haunted by the horizon of finitude, a certain clouded existential panorama; whether it acknowledged it explicitly or evaded the question is another matter.

In the early twenty-first century, Netscape took over the landscape. Just as the word “mail” turned into the retronym “snail mail,” the word “window” will soon become “snail train window.” Microsoft Windows offers faster and more exciting panoramas than the “snail train windows” of the malfunctioning and underfunded Amtrak service.