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When I arrived in Saint-Girons in 2018, a 6.000 inhabitants city at the foot of the Pyrenees, there was this recurring feeling of being on an island. With the pandemic, this feeling had increased, and I was learning the life of a small rural city the hard way. Once the health restrictions were lifted, the feeling never left me.

During the first confinement, I started photographing during the walks authorised by the government. At first, I mainly sought to get to know the city where I had chosen to live by doing a visual diary. Then, things turned slowly into a sort of photographic survey. When it was again possible to go out as far as possible, I realised that beyond this 1km radius the city stopped, quite abruptly at times. I kept photographing despite this, with a soft black and white approach, trying to avoid any idealization and working around the idea that keeping things I saw in a frame would help me make sense of my presence. I followed the same routes for several months, and came across those of other inhabitants. Everyone did the same.

Through repetition, patterns have a way to appear. Quietly, and thanks to the stories told by the people I met and photographed, the landscape started to talk. By paying attention, one can decipher the marks left by human activity. So progressively, I was able to understand the presence of those palm trees, for example, scattered by people returning to their native region after long years of emigration, or how rivers played an important role in a once flourishing industry. I could see how people shared connections, how their stories were different but similar, almost like a direct line of descent. Even my photographs started to evoke a certain filiation, reminding me of the way the rural south in the US had been documented.

After five years down there, it’s a canvas of a fine irregular mesh that these photographs have formed, a canvas of lines running along one another and sometimes meeting.