In June 2020, a massive inferno raged north of Lac Saint-Jean (Québec), decimating 72,000 hectares of the boreal forest. I took off with my camera along the rough gravel roads leading to the region, an unorganized territory within the Des Passes ZEC. I picked my way through some of these blackened desert moonscapes.

For over twenty years, I have lived by the shores of a river that has become very polluted. I have long been observing the transformations of this stream, the changes in its ecosystems as well as the disappearance of some of the animal species that used to live in it. I wished to create a body of work that would bear witness to these man-made upheavals. The declining state of bodies of water certainly counts among the most worrisome environmental issues.

The forlorn landscapes surrounding the Salton Sea are loaded with social, political, environmental and metaphoric implications. They seem to mirror a lost America, an era in which everything seemed possible and accessible for all citizens. These strange lands give us another, unflattering image, of a nation more divided and unequal than ever.

This body of work examines with a critical eye how hydroelectric power has transformed the landscape of Quebec. The project pays attention to how citizens have rallied in order to defend their region and to demand better protection for their environment. It is a politically committed project which looks at the ways we occupy and manage the land.

The Camp de la Rivière activists are water conservationists and whistleblowers who are fighting for a cleaner, healthier environment and a fairer society; they are filling the gap left by governments that have let us down. This body of works is an acknowledgement of these citizens’ commitment, solidarity and selflessness.

These images take a fairly wide variety of forms, including panorama, architectural photography and indoor scenes. Their source is urban landscapes in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Argentina. They depict the changes that are occurring at the same time throughout the Americas in today’s context of a global economy. These transformations are reshaping our territories and everyday life.

I am in Paris’s Xth arrondissement when the events of Friday the 13th of November 2015 occur. The population is petrified, paralysed. While on a photographic mission in France, I get interested in the after effects of these attacks. I observe the reactions, I listen in on the conversations, I take pictures of what I see, often furtively.

In Strasbourg, I spontaneously head toward the European Quarter. Located in the northwest of the city, it covers the Wacken, from the Orangerie to the Robertsau. These government quarters have something about them that speaks to us of another Europe, maybe not the one ordinary citizens had dreamed of though. The legitimacy of the European Union was supposed to be based on prosperity and fairness for all. Today, its citizens are called upon to make sacrifices to their standard of living while multinationals are thriving.

I discovered the Quartier Dix30 and the surrounding real estate developments in the course of a video shoot in Brossard in 2008. These places look like so many others… I feel a little as if I am in a suburb of Denver or Omaha, in Lorraine or in Repentigny… Inevitably, I come across this territory from “nowhere and everywhere”… And yet, there exists another America, and it is still possible.

The term “excavation” can refer to work in construction, road building or drilling, as well as archaeology. In this series I have in some ways sought to unify these different meanings. The montages result from a union of landscapes which seemed to me to have opposite or contradictory significations. I worked with conservation sites rich in natural and human history, then with disturbed sites and their forms of disappearances.

The images in this series were constructed using photographs of suburban houses and model homes. This body of work is presented as an investigation into contemporary suburbs, but it also paints a portrait of our society.

During my residency at Contretype, I am looking at the phenomenon of Brusselisation, as urbanists call the anarchic development of cities left to the whims of real estate developers. It was particularly glaring in the 1960s and 1970s, when Brussels was given over to visions of a city of the future. It is still in evidence today, it seems to me, especially with the development of European institutions.

Near the Old Quebec, one can still see the vestiges of the former St-Vincent-de-Paul church, a neo-classical structure left abandoned for some 20 years, then demolished without a permit by a real estate developer. One cannot help but be affected by the sight of this crumbling façade. I chose several urban landscapes emblematic of Old Quebec and melded them with the ruins of the old church, thereby associating places of memory, historical architecture and picturesque attractions with a more dissonant form of local colour.

Wall House #2 was intended to be constructed in Ridgefield, Connecticut, but was built instead in Groningen, Holland. In my project, I imagined more of these relocations and transformations. Through the use of digital photomontage, I moved the house to a different set of surroundings and manipulated its exteriors and interiors. The house was relocated into improbable contexts where it would have, undoubtedly, been refused admittance. In a number of these created settings, John Hejduk’s architecture plays a disruptive role.

Time seems suspended in these tranquil universes. The vast stretches of land are seductive and embody a touch of the sublime; one could almost consider them a magnification of nature. Yet the serenity of these panoramas is feigned; they sow doubt about natural enchantment. These landscapes-for-show draw attention to our interest in the grandiose and our ambivalent attitude towards the world: our desire to control it as well as our desire to become immersed in it.

At first glance these photomontages look like natural areas, but they aren’t really. Like the landscapes they are based on, they represent nature re-worked. It’s easy to miss the fact that these landscapes are the result of deliberate alterations because they easily blend in with their original models. In some ways, they’ve become our nature.