SUMMER CAMP, 1976 – 1981
The idea of fabricating fictions, the idea of a possible equation between photography and the dummies, struck me quite out of the blue. Childhoods made of flesh and plaster, the many lights of the Luberon, the nostalgia and actuality of desires, crystallised together through the magical operation of the photographic record. The power to fix, eternalise in light, attest to the world the perfection of an instant.
The summer of ’76 got off to a flying start. I could feel my strength and my youth burst open. I filled the Mehari (my cheap Citroen open-top car) with dummies and I was all over the drives, the dormitory in my parents’ children home, the churchyard in Lioux, the swimming-pool in Saint-Saturnin, the beaches of Saintes-Maries de la Mer in the Camargue. I would hurriedly set up the dummies , and after the shot, pack up and set off again. As they invested those places that bore the mark of my childhood I imagined that those little men freed from their shop-windows, released unknown forces, brought to light sublime, masterful evidence.
THE PROBABLE EVOLUTION OF TIME, 1981-1984
In the winter of 1981, after a magnificent snow-fall, I made The Blazing Snow, the last of my staged scenes with dummies. Till then I had thought photography and dummies inseparable. In their stead there sprang flames and explosions, like an aftershock to the force of their falling away, a response to the attraction to the void created by their disappearance.
MADY HOME BY LALA WANG 1981-1984
On a beautiful late summer’s day on the last Sunday of August, 1994, its whitish light hinting at the coming autumn, we celebrated the camp’s last season. For thirty-five years Saint Martian had been synonymous with children and the sound of their play had rung out over the hillside. Smooth legs had bushwhacked through the broom and thistles, abandoning blazed trails for less travelled ones.
For thirty-five years, from May to October, hundreds of campers romped through the fifty acres of land, climbed the Rocher de la Croix, and jumped into my father Francis’ jeep, without there ever being a tragedy or a serious accident.
The work of Pierre Huyghe and photography artist Bernard Faucon provided me with references to create metaphorical spaces（second space）.
The space of Bernard's works has a kind of extreme surrealism but is based on the real society, they create an extreme space state to highlight the contradiction. This makes me deliberately choose to let the performers perform in a solemn and social environment in the work Iodophor hurts hurt. This also prompted my later works to choose to perform performance practices in a more extreme symbolic digital space.