New Way of Living – Sabine Delcour Photography Exhibitions

In recent years, Sabine Delcour mainly surveyed and explored natural areas, far from urban landscapes. However, she has maintained a keen interest in the inhabited territories; the ways we conceive them, the ways we build them and the uses we make of them. Considering that in our essentially urban world, to speak of the city is to speak of the human condition, Delcour continues to explore different cities in the 21st century.

 New Way of Living, her latest project, lies at the crossroads of contemporary social, environmental and societal issues. Here, large-format analog photographs of a vertical urbanism respond to images captured with a telephoto lens of digitized and ultra-connected cities, where the current health crisis legitimizes the generalization of tools for the identification, control, evaluation and isolation of individuals. Is this the prelude to a profound transformation of our societies?

From the ghost city of Ordos to the port city of Qingdao, via the central city of Wuhan, it represents in a formal manner the built landscape but also captures the anthropological dimension of space, a place for human experiences inscribed in new sensitive and relational dimensions. It sets up a device inspired by wildlife observation: to stand aside, to pass unnoticed or to blend in with the environment. She invests in the spaces she photographs by living in them and tracks down the surrounding eco-system from these watchtowers. To do so, she uses a telephoto lens that produces a modest image that questions its status and contrasts with photographs of residences taken.

The “habitus” of Chinese city dwellers like ours borrows essentially from the digital field. In an ultra-connected world, the boundaries between private space (the home) and public space (the city) have become porous. The connections between the city and men are now of a different kind, especially in the Chinese cities. The traceability of digital identities coupled with massive video surveillance is a mutating social order.

The link between physical and virtual space is changing in nature, the forms of public and private life are evolving, and the scale and speed of these transformations are changing the lives of individuals. A field of possibilities is opening up and perhaps a new human race is taking shape.

Delcour left China on the eve of Wuhan’s quarantine. This concomitance exacerbates this anthropological introspection.