This series is about mobility, about the types of relationships we have with places we go through. It’s about this particular space where mental territories meet geographical ones. It’s about how our specific position in the society often contributes to define where, for some of us, we are told to live.
The notion of mobility appears to be taken for granted when applied to Gypsy, Roma or Travelers people. Representations still reinforce the nomadism as an exclusive defining trait, even though most people have nothing to do with these practices. On top of this, it’s fair to say that no other social group in France has suffered as many injunctions to immobility since the end of the XIXth century. In 1990, a law finally passed stating that every city with at least 5.000 inhabitants must provide a site where itinerant Roma and Travelers people can stay. In negative, and without having to be explicit, this law has made any other parking option illegal everywhere in France. It seems to me that the landscapes in which these sites are planned, landscapes imposed on people, bear the mark of these constraints. Waste centers, landfills, cement plants, chemical plants, power plants, quarries, highways, railways, airports, etc. One thing in particular strikes the eye once in such a site: the gaze can never wander very far, one can rarely see the horizon.
For the past several years, I have been using photography in order to form a visual archive of these territories, which one could call enclaves. Simultaneously, I have been cataloguing from the press comments by local residents who speak out whenever a designated site is up for development. This impulse finds its meaning in a simple observation : how is it possible that, as a citizen, the opportunity to cross these spaces and meet the people living in them never arises? Why are they so separate from the rest of us? Trying to answer this question by photographing these spaces amounts to questioning the meaning and the political power carried by the representations. Incidentally, and appart from trying to establish points of contact, photographing the landscapes in which Travelers people are told to live allows me an attempt at reversing the point of view, an attempt at an anthropology of the here and not of the elsewhere, of oneself and not of the other.
Born in 1984, Antoine Le Roux currently lives and works in Rennes, France. After a cycle of literature studies, he shifted towards photography and went to Louis-Lumière National school for photography, in Paris, where he graduated in 2014. he uses photography as a tool for questioning the political meaning of visual representations and in that perspective, he has been developing for many years a large scale project about romani worlds involving visual practices as well as academic research. By this, and through raising questions about otherness or about how history invests the landscape, he tries to open a discussion about the power of images. A brief history of sight received the support of the Ministry of Culture.
© Text and pictures by Antoine Le Roux
