Wild Zone

When my father died, he left us boxes. They were full of things, documents, photos. My answer to this obsessive cluttering was photographic accumulation.

WILD ZONE is one of the winner of the Rencontres photographiques du Xe – Paris (2023 october)

When my father, Maxime Voisin, died, he left us boxes.

There were documents, photos and objects, as useless as they were essential, as anecdotal as they were universal, as obsolete as they were immemorial. A veritable encyclopedia of the story of more than half a century of life, between the 1930s and the 2000s. A boxed existence.

In order to understand such a heavy inheritance, I decided to open them up, to dig up the relics and show them to the public eye.

Initially, there were exactly 229 boxes (and other containers – briefcases, folders, baskets, etc...), neither hidden from view nor totally open to our gaze, grouping about 30,000 documents, 1,800 objects, and some rough drafts of scattered collections.

What strikes us the most is the shock of grief and the abyss of hoarding. Or vice versa.

In this long-term work, I pay tribute to my father by playing the part of collector/ researcher who discovers, orders, classifies and selects images worthy of photographic reproduction, according to a strict protocol.

Thus, my answer to this obsessive cluttering is photographic accumulation.

The 2027 images made are grouped into 84 contact sheets, themselves grouped into 8 panels. Each panel corresponds to the boxes and containers found in the same part of the house.

From these contact sheets, single photographs have been extracted.