Philippe Calandre / Fiction Architecture
“My research is articulated around iconic deconstruction, and the question of the power that the photographic image exercises on our contemporary societies.
It is said that, “A photograph depicts what it wants,” that its meaning can be thus corrupted and that it may show a thing and its opposite, despite its referent. Deconstructing the documentary image has become a fundamental issue that repels limits of frame and narration. This questioning lays the groundwork for disruption of the static favored by the accession of the digital age.
I chose industrial architecture as a showcase because of its duality with photo montage by the juxtaposition and the organization of its forms in a puzzle: silos, tanks, ramps, conveyor belts and stoves.
Previously revealed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, this architectural typology allowed me to perceive the freedom of forms and volumes posed in empty space.
A factory is a set of accumulations of modules linked together, with the unique design of transforming matter to produce something other.
In developing my photomontages I make real false photographs of architecture, I blur the lines of reading and perception, I extend the transformation of matter and image by reversing processes; the factory no longer transforms, but is transformed, and the image shows nothing that may be the embodiment of a tautological truth, since the subject has disappeared.
Like industrial design, which assembles a final product from things manufactured or developed in the four corners of globalization, my constructions, through their spatial organization, echo the poetry of this contemporary metamorphosis.”
Philippe Calandre
