1BPM
24h
60m
60s
May 20th 2024 I performed 1 BPM from May 19 at 6:02 to May 20 at 6:02. Saturday night I went to bed around 10 p.m. I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. but at 5:24 a.m. I was awake. I took a quick shower, put on my clothes and received Astrid's call at 6:00 am, she was there. By the time she got up to the apartment it was already 6:03. I was in airplane mode. I had experienced one of the most ordinary days of my life from a diary point of view: wake up, bakery, breakfast, break, flea market, break, family lunch, break, reading, shopping, aperitif, aperitif, concert, dinner, break, game, music, walk. In the act of photography, there's a form of theft: we capture, we rob the world of one of its moments, we freeze it and it's there for eternity. Repeating this act over 1400 times in 24 hours becomes a form of violence done to the world. Dissecting your world in 1400 shots is a radical act of transparency in which you expose yourself. There are no obscene clichés, but the process itself can be. A few months ago, Astrid gave me a book on “raw photography”, and I took raw photos, with no aesthetic aim in the shots, just snapshots of what's before my eyes or in my head. I hate exposing myself in public. I only talk about my feelings and states of mind to a handful of people, those with whom there's an echo, those I trust, so to them I agree to make myself vulnerable. With 1 BPM, I made myself vulnerable to everyone, but above all to myself. I took a risk, I was on the edge for 24 hours.
May 21st, 2024 Today I tidied up the apartment, and it's strange because I uninstalled something I didn't install. I think it has a lot to do with the event of death, which suddenly uninstalls life. It always does it in the same way, it kills, whereas life exists and installs itself in so many ways. This variety fascinates me as much as this constancy. All the places I return to have become places like exhibits that I've sealed somewhere inside me. Since this morning, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of advent in connection with the idea of death, which happens like an accident, which is triggered. We say the advent of death, not the event of death.
May 26th 2024 I'm in Soligny la Trappe at my parents' house. They asked me what I was going to do with these photos. I told them I'd written about the experience, and they read about May 20 and 21. They seemed interested. There was a country silence in the house, and then the sun, which had risen in the gray of Normandy, came into the house. I was on the lookout for their reactions, hunting for the slightest grin on their faces, a leg or a hand moving. My father went to the bathroom and my mother to the kitchen. I stayed with my mother for a while and we chatted briefly about the advent. Then a thought came to me about the notion of straight line, segment, infinite and finite, continuous and discontinuous: the segment is that succession of points so close together that they transform the discontinuous into continuous. All these points are events, but only the first and last are events. The event is a segment, not a straight line. Life is a segment. I loved photographing departures: how you settle somewhere and how you leave that place.