Les Villes Invisibles

2020

A3 format, 180g

Black pen on paper, processed by a plotter Video (4'00)

Béatrice Lartigue, Lab212

Les Villes Invisibles is an artistic installation around the theme of memory. More specifically, this piece investigates the notions of emptiness and absence in the shared social space the city represents.

This piece is a personal testimony, echoing the work Le Città Invisibili by writer Italo Calvino, published in Turin in 1972.

Les Villes Invisibles portrays the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, built in the 12th century. With a surface area of 6,000 m2 and a height of 70m, the monument designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, testifies of a genuine technological achievement by the architects of the Middle Ages.

As in the eponymous book, Les Villes Invisibles sets out a space where the visitor can "enter, walk around, perhaps get lost, but where, at one time or another, he must find a way out, or even several ways out".

On 15 April 2019, a violent fire destroyed the spire and the entire roof protecting the nave, choir and transept of the gothic edifice.

Les Villes Invisibles draws on imaginary continents and brings back to the centre of the game, issues raised by techniques like photogrammetry (notably developing in cartography and archeology disciplines) that wonder over man's status in modern cities, as a place of history and desire.

Photogrammetry combines a set of techniques used to determine the shape, dimensions and spatial position of an object from a corpus of photographs. This process includes a phase of photographic recording of the perspectives and a phase of rendering, to produce a 3D model.

This technique queries our perception of reality, its recording at a given time (before or after a disaster) and its scientific accuracy (the large amount of data required...).

Finally, the narrative presented through Les Villes Invisibles confronts this capture of reality with its perception, especially through the time passing by and the bias of our senses (omniscient vision, feeling of ubiquity).

The paper drawings fix in time this perception of the site.