OCCUPIED TERRITORIES (France, 2010)

Jérémie Lenoir’s aerial photos of the French landscape lift nature out of its normal context and re-veal the abstraction that man has imposed on it. ‘The world no longer represents our recognisable, banal ideas’, he says. ‘It is a collection of forms, which repeat themselves and accumulate until they loose all meaning.’ This reality is one of radical geometry, totalitarian lines, or, on the contrary, confusing boundaries. In this way Lenoir hopes to make the landscape a symbol for our society and our thought process. Moreover, he touches a sore spot: the contradictions in our thinking. Despite speaking more than we ever have before about protecting the environment, we have never polluted the environment as much. And while we subject our liberal economic model to serious critique, we continue to worship the objectives of that model. The reconstructed landscape also demonstrates that.