Sleeper is part of the same line of work as "Conjunctions of coordinations" video and "Vrai(s)emblable(s)" photographs. it is a visual recomposition taken from a lived experience: "Going down the stairs of a subway entrance,  I saw a man lying on the ground."

In the same process as "Conjunctions of coordinations" where "I refer to memory to reconstitute scenes seen. I asked a friend to sleep in a public passage, the time of the two instantaneous photographic shots."

Two photographs of the same scene, a man lying on the ground, taken from two different points of view. Conceived as an assemblage, the two images are brought together in the exhibition space. They have a similar size of one meter eighty in width by one meter twenty in height. The images are taken with an automatic camera in the experience of an instantaneousness, of a speed of taking/pausing photography as when looking at something or someone in motion. In the image on the left, a man is lying on the mezzanine of a staircase, photographed from behind, we see in the background two passers-by framed at the waist climbing the stairs. In the image on the right, the same man is photographed from the front, we see two passers-by framed at the waist going down the stairs. The image on the left suggests the death of the man while that on the right the man appears to be sleeping.

The staircase, the passage is not taken into account in the same way as "Vrai(s)emblable(s)", it is not a representative place like the station where one plans to be transported but rather the site of a physical experience of movement and space. The staircase by the function of descending or ascending indicates the logic of a top/bottom, of a stratification of space, of a before/after, of a chronology of space, of an entrance /output is an identification of the space. it is a space that implies a logic of displacement, of the movement of circulation. "I chose the staircase for this logic of movement so that I could then use it for the assembly."
In the consideration of two states, the angles of view are determining in an image, the man sleeps: one sees his face, in the other, he is dead: one does not see him. The identity of the person will operate by his state. "I assembled the two images corresponding to two different spaces / times to create a single space. This space becomes a staircase in "a vanishing point" from which we see four passers-by arriving from afar (circulation, movement)" .We recognize the same man doubled in space, both dead and alive, which leads to a double perception of the representation of space and time, while the simultaneity of the gaze takes place off-camera in a assembly memory.

The title "Dormeur" is recognized as the function of the person who is taken in  photo also if we dissociate the two syllables, we find there phonetically the verb to sleep and to die in the imperative reunites. An imperative linked to a reality that needs to be deconstructed in order to be reconstructed in order to consider a fiction understood as possibility in a principle of reality. In the experience of a look, there is this attention to perceive what one seeks to perceive, it is in this infinite search for visual perspectives that the image reveals itself as depth.


Text Fabienne Fulchéri for the exhibition X Cac Passage Troyes 2001