This project is inspired by an excerpt from the novel À Rebours by J.-K. Huysmans, which depicts a nature that is both morbid and monstrous. This poetic vision led me to confront the landscapes along the Rhône and Arve rivers with scenes of domesticated nature, exploring the boundary between the natural and the artificial.

While walking along the Geneva banks, I collected flowers with varying statuses: indigenous, protected, invasive, or endangered. Each category was staged in floral compositions, evoking the familiar aesthetics of home bouquets. Simultaneously, more dreamlike images, captured in the greenhouses of the Geneva Botanical Garden, disrupt our perception of this vegetation, introducing an uncertainty about the reality of these forms. 

Other, more experimental photographs seek to create new landscapes, imbued with the sublime and the dreamlike. I submerge the negatives of my images in acidic mixtures and water from the Rhône or the Arve, depending on the proximity of the shots, for several days. The gradual deterioration of these negatives generates a new form of landscape, reminiscent of the iconography of dreams, where the materiality of the image merges with the substance of the places.

Through a short film, I invite a visual wandering and a contemplative pause. The shots, ranging from raw nature to lush greenhouses, accompany this poetic journey from the Jonction to the Verbois dam. Some scenes recall The Zone from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, while others, focusing on the flowers and the buzzing insects around them, become minimalist natural tableaux. The project weaves a universe that oscillates between the inside and the outside, between the wild and the artificial greenhouses of the region.

This project was realized in collaboration with Stella Laïka.