VESTIGES At the beginning of the 1990s, I was taken for several months on the same long motorway journey where I tirelessly plunged my gaze as a captive spectator into a landscape from which a succession of structures sprang up from the ground or penetrated the décor. Driving at daybreak on still deserted roads, I contemplated these constructions like a traveller discovering the remains of a lost civilisation whose original function he would struggle to understand. In their own way, these monuments spoke eloquently of the brutality of our relationship with our environment. We were still far from being aware of the risk of collapse of our civilisation, but I wondered how our infrastructures could be seen, one day, by others, in another time. From this questioning was born the desire to draw up a sort of photographic inventory of these places in the making, taking care to detach them as much as possible from the slightest temporal link so that they escape their role, their functionality, in order to appear like new monuments freshly uncovered. This journey in search of our future vestiges led me progressively to the mountains where the confrontation between the built environment and the landscape reaches a dazzling intensity. Buildings simply intended to curb the power of water take on the appearance of ancient temples and rub shoulders with dykes designed like sculptures or protective structures that function like forgotten Land Art installations. Moving away from the tumult of our time, I usually take advantage of a few furtive moments to act, imbuing these images with a form of quietude similar to the one that could well settle around our last traces, which have become ephemeral and fragile, surrounded only by the rustling of nature taking back its rights. Coming from the most diverse places, these images are nevertheless assembled together to constitute a sort of archaeological catalogue of a future times; or a form of imaginary atlas of a territory to come... beyond our presence having so disturbed this world, where we nevertheless continue our mad race. BIOGRAPHY After his training in an advertising photography studio in Geneva, Jean-Marc Yersin worked in a variety of fields. During a long trip to North America in 1981, he made "Downtown", questioning the place of the individual in the American city. Together with his wife Pascale Bonnard Yersin, an archaeologist, they took over the direction of the Swiss Museum of Photography in Vevey in 1991, where they were among the founders of the Festival Images in 1995. As soon as the extension and complete transformation of the Museum was completed in 2012, Jean-Marc Yersin was able to gradually resume his own photographic projects to which he has devoted himself more freely since his retirement in 2018. Through his photographs, he questions the way in which what could well become our future vestiges, would be seen, one day, by others, in another time. From this questioning was born the desire to draw up a sort of atlas of these places in the making, which he publishes in the form of artist's books, "The sketchbook’s of another age", of which three volumes have already appeared. These publications have also been the subject of various exhibitions and projections, both in Switzerland and in France. In his practice, Jean-Marc Yersin conceives and realizes himself the whole of his projects by attaching a great importance to the materiality of his prints as well as to the layout of his publications and the hanging of his exhibitions. Inspired by the kinship between inkjet printing and the world of engraving, he has set up a printing studio where he has developed his own style of black and white prints using very deep inks, even in his large formats.