Le bleu du ciel

« It was a wonderful summer day, not too hot, the swallows traced on the blue sky large curved lines that one thought could still be seen when they had passed. »¹

Twice a year, swallows cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to join sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. During their winter disappearance, Aristotle believed they hibernated in the mud of ponds. It was not until the end of the 18th century that the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, in his Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, challenged these theories and suggested that swallows spend the winter in less cold regions. He was followed in Italy by other scientists who, by attaching colored threads to the legs of swallows, invented the technique of bird banding and inscribed the study of bird migration in the extraordinary development that sciences experienced in the 19th century. Since its invention, photography has participated in these developments; it is a technical tool for revealing and documenting reality and the world (major ethnographic expeditions, state photographic commissions since 1861). Transforming our perceptions, profoundly marking our collective representations and visual memory, it accompanies the upheavals of the time: machines, industrialization, new means of transport, wars.

Starting from the subject of the swallow, we seek to develop a sensitive representation of the passage of time, movement, and exchanges and circulations within a space. On the scale of flight, the movement of swallows in the sky is the object of fascination that nourishes the imagination. The birds seem to follow a score made of breaks, accelerations, and silences, drawing abstract shapes like signs to be interpreted. This project is an experimentation at the crossroads of artistic and scientific uses of photographic and musical mediums. Between formal rigor and subjective narration, the research unfolds an approach where the swallow in flight, representing a force vector, gives form and substance to an insatiable desire for freedom with the sky as a perspective.

¹ Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, 1885.