Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques

"In 2008, I went to photograph the southern United States for several months. The mythological and visual aura that surrounds the representation of America, which is as much a part of the collective imagination as it is of the personal, became the subject of my photographs, and my research focused on decentering and the inability to affirm a univocal vision of a world. The opacity or duplicity of the photographs makes them uncertain and unstable. I had already drawn a parallel between cars and the sliding of images - metaphorai in Greek literally means "a transport" - in my American project; I decided to photograph the cars of a car club during the residency. These powerful sports cars, whose engines are measured in horsepower, seemed to me a perfect metaphor for a disruptive vision - via rupta means "the road" - and a slippery association with the figure of the horse, which holds an important place in this Norman city. Elsewhere, I looked again for America, not so much in its warlike history in Normandy as in the American film festival that takes place in the city. Again, the images evaded their definition, fled their contingency to the Real, were inevitably transported into a fictional and literally imagined regime.The piece I present - General motors - evokes this quest for definition through the image of a city that is made in the moving space of the imaginary, as well as this American coloration that has pursued me for several years."