Brouillard Matthieu

"L'essor" consists of a video installation and a series of photographs. This project focuses on the non-conforming figure of Christian Forget, a sort of present-day Icarus. Christian suffers from oculo-cutaneous albinism, a genetic condition that makes his skin hypersensitive to sunlight and severely impairs his vision. But he has a dream: to fly, to defy gravity, to rise up against the weight of the body. After years of perseverance, this dream has now become a reality, as Christian has been given permission to undertake solo flights with a paraglider.

I thought that this story of a physically disabled individual succeeding, through the practice of free flight, in opening up a space where gravity seems suspended, could symbolize a conquest of the improbable—an ecstatic transcendence of limitations. While the video installation addresses the experience of flight as such, the photographic series, based on an approach that is as much a documentary as a staging of fantasies, focuses on highly suggestive gestures that are linked to the handling of the paraglider and expresses the longing to escape a constraining condition.