LES DÉ-RÉ

Deteriorated, dismantled, demolished, destroyed, destined to be... Recovered, renovated, rehabilitated, reintegrated, or not. These are the red brick houses occupied by miners from the North of France, in the not-so-distant past.

These are LES DÉ-RÉ. Architectural remains slowly disappering, witnesses of a heritage to be reconverted, scenographies of homes from another era. A house is a body that carries multiple stories. And like all bodies, it absorbs, transforms, becomes, and leaves traces.

Whose words, since the houses speak. Bricks, beams, wallpapers and cracks tell of families who have come from elsewhere to seek black gold in the deep abysses of a land that is as cold as it is foreign.

Black, a common color here in the mining basin, common to the winter sky, the slagheaps, the coal dust and the black mouths that breathed it in, worn down by silicosis.

And yet, the mining de-re were dressed in bucolic patterns in pastel colors. The pink, the purple, the green of the wallpapers resisted him, the black. They defied humidity, melancholy, mourning. This is what you can hear when you freeze in front of the warm colors of the flowery walls or the lace embroidered by the mold that runs along the ceilings. Facing the ragged walls with hypnotic features, these remains trace an immersive journey and open up new possibilities to the field, through their own mise en abyme.