Fusion of horizons (2016)

Photographic essay for three video projection screens on the general theme of art, the city and citizenship. The project includes some 300 images coupled with texts by me and Michel Lefebvre (in French, English, Spanish) and an original soundtrack by Thierry Gauthier.

“Fusion of horizons” refers to a concept developed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Gadamer proposes that we always understand, at least in part, from our own horizon when we seek to approach something (say, an “other horizon”), but without always being expressly aware of it. Understanding thus involves a “fusion” of the horizons of the interpreter and of the object of interpretation, in which one cannot always distinguish what comes from one or the other.

In this project, more specifically, I wanted to articulate a certain universal vision from a multiple photographic corpus developed around the work done by artists and citizens to build and inhabit their environment. To inhabit is to be in the world, but it can also be “to build oneself by building the world” (Olivier Lazzarotti, 2013). My thematic research focuses on these two axes: how citizen artists live and express themselves in the public space, and how the city in turn communicates through signs and symbols. If the city’s communication occurs more and more through staging places, artists’ interventions seep in to add complexity, contributing to the polyphonic voice of the city.