The village church in Péage de Roussillon overlooks the Rhone valley for centuries. A place with powerful memories, it is anchored in identities shared by everybody, whose symbolic function is however no longer questioned by the test of everyday life.
This church was stormed by Maryvonne Arnaud in 1987: standing on a high-lift truck parked a few meters away from the church frontage, she has for a few hours taken a comprehensive set of detailed shots. 110 images, approximately one metre square, taken from the front without vanishing lines, which recreated the whole façade.
But the rigour of this systematic shooting does not hide the weaknesses of the photographer, on the contrary it shows some loss of details, some spatial inconsistencies, and brings out the physical challenge of this long commitment.
These fragments are then reproduced full scale, then put together on a network of cables strung across the front of the building.
Far from recreating the original façade, the monumental work re-composes it in another spatial and temporal dimension: each puff of wind makes the 150 square meters of this façade of sensitive paper flutter in the wind and escape from gravity towards to live a new life with baroque hues!
Three years in a row, and in three different cities of the Rhône Valley, including Arles during the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Maryvonne Arnaud systematically shoots the façade of a particular building, before delivering it to the Mistral wind.
