Scène de Vie, Point de Vue

The city may be considered as a single work, an artifact charged with symbolic values, the locus of a collective memory. Fernand Pouillon’s work—his housing estates as well as his resort complexes—may be envisaged as an ingenious construction of “mini-cities” in which cohabitate a multiplicity of lives leaving traces and writing the history of these architectures in time. Residents, workers, and tourists fill these spaces and make them their own, fitting them out as the places where their lives are lived. These anonymous lives become the central argument of the sequences filmed like photographic portraits taken by Daphné Bengoa in Algiers housing development and resort complexes of Fernand Pouillon. The images offer a voyage “from outside to inside,” making themselves the discreet witnesses of dreams of the future and implacable realities.