| الوصف: |
Looking at photographs of Parisian construction (and destruction) sites by artists Marc Petitjean and Stéphane Couturier, Chapter One proposes that pictures of urban landscapes in various stages of mutation depict the city not merely as a bounded physical reality, but as a dialectical process. Both Petitjean’s series on the evolution of the neighborhood surrounding the Pompidou Center and Couturier’s views of the innards of nearby buildings in his “Urban Archaeology” series bear witness to the processes of an architectonic form of creative destruction in Paris’ city center. As they elicit the past, present, and future life of the buildings they picture, their images consider how the production and use of space factors into the larger historical processes of Paris’ becoming. When examined closely and in tandem, however, Petitjean’s and Couturier’s photographs also hint at the logic of speculation, in both the visual and commercial sense of that term, that subtends their production, dissemination, and display. In doing so, both projects study the construction site as part of a strategy to lay bare what the rhythms of modernization and capitalism often obscure and leave behind. |
