Urbanautica

ANTOINE LE ROUX. GYPSY CYCLE

by Steve Bisson

In the 90s, France legislated so that all municipalities with over 5,000 inhabitants identified a specific area to settle Roma and nomadic communities. A bit like a mathematical formula whose effectiveness is measured in reverse, the primary result was to exclude these unwanted inhabitants' permanence from any other space.

© Antoine Le Roux from the series "A brief history of sight"

How we consume images matters. In the current compulsive and substantially passive and superficial scroll-posture, little margin remains for a critical analysis, and for discernment. The cache fills up quickly; the imagination is saturated, and the perspective is often a dead end. The daily accumulation of images is more than a process of selective collection of information like water held back by a dam; it looks more like a flood that has broken its banks and spreads randomly. Online we surf on a rampant tide that expands as far as possible rather than in a precise direction.

© Antoine Le Roux from the series "A brief history of sight"

© Antoine Le Roux, from the series "aire d'accueil" (Cycle Tsigane)

We are facing real climate change. We are facing an unprecedented phenomenon of "visual" floods that break through the gaze and invade our mental landscapes to modify them. No embankment holds. We are all largely exposed to the aforementioned iconological risk.
The remedy is, once again, education—the education to receive, read, digest, and share images. For a long time, literature, made up of written words, served to stage the seasons of life, weigh emotions, recognize difficulties, learn about people, discover the faces of beauty, marvel at diversity, and exercise fantasy. To navigate the world between high tides and moments of dryness. In this garden of words, stories, and memories, everyone could cultivate their soul's horizons in that secret courtyard where we are with eyes closed. Today, however, literature is increasingly being translated into images. In images of others, whom we can, or should look like. The fantasy that populated the inner garden of our imaginations ended up in the cupboard since there is no much left to grow on the ground. Imaginaries are colonized by exotic plants and weeds that cling to what remains of our very own arguments, feeding on the fertile subsoil of dreams and desires that everyone harbors within themselves.

© Antoine Le Roux, from the series "aire d'accueil" (Cycle Tsigane)

Therefore, like gardeners, we should take care of our cognitive background. To do this, we need to learn how to filter images and distinguish the "medicinal" from the "parasitic" ones. Among the first are those offering objective definitions of the world, which enrich the vocabulary. For example, the work "Cycle Tsigane" by Antoine Le Roux (Urbanautica Institute Annual Awards 2022) fall nicely into this category. In the 90s, France legislated so that all municipalities with over 5,000 inhabitants identified a specific area to settle Roma and nomadic communities. A bit like a mathematical formula whose effectiveness is measured in reverse, the primary result was to exclude these unwanted inhabitants' permanence from any other space. Le Roux's work starts from these premises with the need to observe the quality of these sites and what their choice has in common. One result is that Roma are often assigned undesirable and marginal sites as well documented in the series "aire d'accueil". So we go by exclusion where no one wants to be. Hence the places of exclusion. The distance and posture with which Le Roux photographed them are well translated by the words of Christian Caujolle.

© Antoine Le Roux, from the series "aire d'accueil" (Cycle Tsigane)

This catalog, or inventory, illustrates a different mental geography, a geography of exclusion, and a settlement concept that manifests in precise morphological topos (waste centers, landfills, cement plants, chemical plants, power plants, quarries, highways, railways, airports, etc.). The places of exclusion have in common with the "non-places" (defined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé) a provisional condition with little identity. However, they differentiate by a substantial marginality. If non-places are aggregating, centrifugal, traversable, and sometimes profitable spaces, the places of exclusion are rather repellent, alien, and undesirable. Le Roux's photographs remind me of the discriminatory architectures and hostile urban design documented in some large cities by Julius C. Schreiner, or remaining in France, the collection of anti-intrusion devices collected in the "Anti Installation" series by Geoffrey Mathieu in collaboration with the geographer Jordi Ballesta.

© Antoine Le Roux from the series "A brief history of sight"

© Geoffroy Mathieu and Jordi Ballesta from the series "Anti Installation France"

What we observe expands the field of hostile design, whose abacus of possible solutions is already quite varied. Let's go back to the views of the "pro-Roma" areas photographed by Le Roux. We can choose to drown in images, or we can decide to search for them. I came to this work by Antoine Le Roux because I decided to observe the world critically, understand its dynamics, and get help from those who can do it wisely through photography. Our mind is populated by a deposit of images, like a large database. These images form (or abstract) imaginaries, such as ideas or possible representations of the world. Everything feeds the substrate of reasoning. The strength of the images lies in the ability to synthesize. The downside is that these visions are pretty gross. If what we know about the world (or what we think we know about the world) is based on images, as is increasingly happening, we risk losing definition. The installation "Démantèlement" thus figures out what we must do. It's not so much a zoom on the details but a slow reconstruction as decomposing the picture into a puzzle. And this leads us to question the dynamic of perception, particularly the time of acquisition of the images. We have to move from the fulminant scroll that storms the retina to a slow digestion that filters the underlying sense. Such a choice can only result in a daily reduction of jpg's radiation exposure. Our reserve of images, which is undoubtedly renewable but not unlimited, like a computer's memory, will benefit.

© Antoine Le Roux, from the series Démantèlement (Cycle Tsigane). Still from 4:33 - Installation views of Louis-Lumière' students (Paris, 2013)

Finally, I'd like to address the scope of what I call "the archeology of images". As paleontologists, we can read the layers of history in pictures. This type of foray guarantees reading depth, consolidates the arguments' thickness and helps us experience the near future with less arrogance. And with a modest determination, it should help us clean up the inventories, the useless, unfounded, superficial. The work under the title "la fabrique de Maximoff" reflects, in my view, a similar intention. Revisiting the archive of Matéo Maximoff, a significant Roma writer who adopted photography as an indestructible stamp of memory, bears witness to the "geological" value of time. Alias, how to put your will on solid foundations.

Antoine Le Roux (website)

share this page

more on Antoine Le Roux GO TO ANTOINE LE ROUX'S PAGE

portfolio
A brief history of sight
Antoine Le Roux