“My interest in the city of Brasilia comes from a mixture of fascination and nostalgia for the stories and representations of the Future. Indeed, the Brazilian capital designed by Oscar Niemeyer and built in 4 years in the middle of a desert, embodies the vision of the future of the 60s. The pilot plan conceived in 1957 by urban planner Lucio Costa coincides with the beginning of the space age and the first artificial satellite of Earth: Sputnik. It is the golden age of the space age, and the city of Brasilia, with its air of a flying saucer that would have landed in the middle of nowhere, shows nostalgia and the dream of a future frozen in time. The case is unique because of its size, an entire city, and its state of conservation: the city’s pilot plan has remained unchanged due to its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Brasilia, a fossilized modernist temple in a utopian future, is a veritable time capsule. For this series, I used the city as a setting in which the inhabitants are staged. During my wanderings, different stories came to mind: On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges (1946) and this strange empire whose geographical map covers the whole territory, The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati (1940) and the story of a man who waits all his life for an event that will not happen or the film The Truman Show by Peter Weir (1988) whose hero lives in an illusion. Finally, we must also mention the breathtaking and crazy beauty of the city of Brasilia where absolutely everything is composed with the same writing: linear, precise, minimal, fluid, radical, airy, monumental, musical…”
