Ergol #6, S1B clean room, Arianespace, Guiana Space Center [CGS], Kourou, French Guiana, 2011., 2011

My work is very freely inspired by the dream and mystery that scientific and technological utopias resonate in the collective imagination. With "Space Project" I deliberately mixed a historical and documentary vision of the space adventure with scenes staged by cinema and my childhood memories. Thus, these mythical places of space exploration; the Star City in Russia, the Cape Canaveral launching centers in the United States, Baikonur in Kazakhstan and Ariane Space in Guyana, the star observatories in the Atacama desert in Chile, New Mexico and Nevada, the Martian simulation base in the red desert of Utah, are film sets where Jacques Tati cross Jules Vernes or Stanley Kubrick. " "Space is the great adventure of humanity, a leap into the void, into the dark light, beyond the protective atmosphere of the Earth and the gravity that connects us to it. It is the universal desire to contemplate the sky but also to project it. Desire, from Latin desiderare means nostalgia for the star, regret for a lost star. But how could one desire something unknown? Could it be that the dust of stars that we are remembering this primitive time where we floated in space? The man would then be like a god fallen from the sky, nostalgic and unconscious of this star that he lost. My fascination, aesthetic, philosophical, and fun, for the space adventure, certainly comes from images and books that I saw and read in the 70s / 80s, from these TV series, novels and sci-fi films , documentaries and news, which have mixed and superimposed in my memory like a palimpsest. My images are the result of this mixture between purely documentary elements and a very constructed staging where each element depends on a general composition. Thus the emblematic places of the space conquest have been film sets where Tintin meets Jules Verne in the film 2001, Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick. Between 2007 and 2017 I photographed the past and future of space exploration, from the memories of the Apollo program that followed the first steps of Man on the Moon, to the future NASA SLS rocket for go on Mars. This decade also marks the opening and transition from politics to economics in the space sector, whose geographical dimension is now global and global. Indeed, after the cold war and the domination of the national superpowers, the space sector is less of a military issue than an economic investment led also by private industries whose interests are multiple: communication, science, research and development, meteorology, ecology , health, technology, and even space tourism. I thank here all the space centers that gave me their confidence and allowed me to venture behind the gates of these places so secretly guarded. They allowed me to relive my dreams of children and I show them all my gratitude here. Thanks to NASA Centers in the United States, John F. Kennedy Space Center (Florida), Johnson Space Center (Texas), Langley Research Center (Virginia), Stennis Space Center (Mississippi), Marshall Space Flight Center (Alabama), Michud Assembly Facility (Louisiana), the ILC company in the Deleware (making combinations of NASA since the Apollo program), also in America private companies Virgin Galactic, Google LunarXprize, Astrobotic, Moon Express and Synergy Moon, in Russia the Yuri Gagarin Training Center of the Cité des Etoiles, in Kazakhstan the cosmodrome Roscomos (Baïkonour), in French Guiana the center Arianespace and in France EADS Space, the CNRS, and ISAE, the agency ESA (European Space Agency), in Holland the ESTEC center, in Germany PT Scientists, in Israel SpaceIL, in Japan Hakuto, in India TeamIndus, in the Atacama desert in Chile, observatories of ESO, Paranal and ALMA, IRAM in France, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, VLA in New Mexico, Carma in California,the aurora borealis observatory Kjell Hendriksen, Eiscat and KHO on Norway's Svalbard Island, and finally the MDRS Martian simulation base in the red Utah desert.