In the mid-19th century, a young girl claimed to have had 18 visions in Lourdes, a small town in the French Hautes-Pyrénées. Since then, the Church counted seventy miracles and made the town a prime pilgrimage destination for people seeking physical or spiritual healing.
There will be miracles here documents architectures and public spaces in this mythologised territory, from a vision that voluntarily places itself on the margins of the "extraordinary".
The project explores the meaning of the act of inhabiting common spaces and refers to rites and myths in a permanent state of displacement and re-actualisation.
In an effort to deconstruct an idea of the environment that comes to us through hegemonic narratives, he questions how the terrain of the miraculous is created and delimited geographically. Only through video pieces the work approach the sanctuary slightly, showing the new forms of actualisation within religious discourse through technology and virtuality.
Through the portraits of the inhabitants of Lourdes in public spaces, the work reflects on the processes of self-representation and how we establish a performative relationship with photography by placing ourselves in the scene.
The photographic series explores the genres and languages we use to try to understand the environment. Assuming the impossibility of recording with images the marks that meta-narratives and myths leave on collective identities, the work examines how photography conditions our own visions.
Lourdes Grotto Webcam
video installation
12 minutes
Lourdes Grotto Webcam" is a short visual essay made from fragments of video that the camera of the grotto of the apparitions transmits live 24 hours a day. In particular, the work captures moments when visitors photograph themselves in front of the grotto. Through the images, it reflects on the processes of self-representation and how we establish a performative relationship with photography by placing ourselves in the scene. In this space, a double register is produced. The actions are photographed with the visitors' mobile phones while they are recorded and broadcast live from the LourdesTV webcam. Through the new ways of updating religious discourse through virtuality, the video invites us to think about the relations between the development of technology as a surveillance tool and the characteristics of the production and circulation of the contemporary image.
Petit train touristique
video installation
20min 06 seg
Rachel Mallarme is 19 years old, lives in Lourdes and works full time in the town's bar. The video captures her experience of boarding the small tourist train which, due to its price and route, is usually only used by tourists. Through Rachel's eyes and her reactions, the viewer is given a tour of Lourdes.
While she listens to the audio guide of "Le petit train" through the headphones, the viewer can only hear the ambient sound of the village and the conversation between two tourists, a mother and a daughter, who ride on the front carriage behind the camera.