On nous a dit qu'il n'y avait rien et nous sommes allés le chercher

"This project was created along a double displacement, that of the very action of walking, of surveying, step by step, the places and the hidden corners of a territory, and that of the constant questioning that tended, more than to find answers, to imagine new questions that allowed us to establish a dialogue around the possible realities. This journey is nurtured by a double approach, that of photography and that of anthropology, proposing two distinct relationships as well as two languages that blend together to finally present a universe that comes as much from listening to and understanding the human being as from the play of the gaze and interaction.

The starting point was a sentence: "here, there is nothing". 

What is this nothing, so present on everyone's lips? Essentially, nothing is a negation or an absence, so what does its almost omnipresence tell us about? What is the material meaning of this nothing, what form does it take? We have searched for nothing, found it and lost it again a hundred times, so that it finally becomes something more and more inaccessible, volatile, soluble.

The series is a kind of cartography, a constellation of landmarks. The mysteries and tensions that underline the fragility of the landscape, natural and human, as well as our own pragmatic limits, presented themselves to us as enigmas. Far from blocking us, these enigmas allowed us to aim further, in search of new, less obvious sedimentary layers that contributed to new questionings. We proposed a shift from the real to the symbolic and from the imaginary to the imaginative, to tell what our way of being and sharing the territory had been. 

This project was carried out as part of a creative residency set up by the Centre d'Interprétation de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine (CIAP) d'Amiens, between March 2021 and June 2022, around the communes of Amiens Métropole."

Irma Estrada, anthropologist