Bidonville

The original idea for Bidonville comes from a sketch of Brazilian favelas I made for Genuary 2022. My goal with this was to turn the concept into a long form series, give it some real variety, and flesh it out both visually and conceptually. It’s first intended as a reminder that such places exist all over the world. And that a quarter of world’s urban population live with poor access to robust housing, clean water, electricity, security … I wanted to keep a playful feeling to it though. Slums ...

The original idea for Bidonville comes from a sketch of Brazilian favelas I made for Genuary 2022. My goal with this was to turn the concept into a long form series, give it some real variety, and flesh it out both visually and conceptually. It’s first intended as a reminder that such places exist all over the world. And that a quarter of world’s urban population live with poor access to robust housing, clean water, electricity, security … I wanted to keep a playful feeling to it though. Slums represent much more than poverty to me. They also represent life at its fullest, wild and uncontrolled. Life and death. A lot of life and a lot of death all the time, both coexisting in the smallest spaces. That’s the duality I wanted to explore with this project. Promiscuity between life and death. I first focused on producing various layouts while keeping a very crowded feeling to the composition. I’m using an irregular grid system so every available space within a predefined shape is occupied. The negative space with an empty background symbolizes the void associated to death. It’s here to bring a maximum contrast to the colorful and lively slum.  I also played with the idea of vertigo - which is something I personally suffer from in my everyday life. I initially wanted to diverge from the strictly representative works I had previously done and lean towards a more stylized approach. As I was working on layouts, I found an emerging pattern around verticality. The houses, walls and stairs of the slum seem to pile up on top of each other and create a precarious balance. Everything could fall apart at any moment there. I also put a lot of effort in finding the right textures and colors. Aesthetically speaking, I’m fascinated by nature and its apparent chaos, and I tend to reject architecture and everything planned and built by humans. But there’s a thing about cityscapes seen from a distance. The diversity of colors and materials, the overwhelming details you get when you stand far from cities give a very organic feel to them. It reminds us we are tiny living things trying to organize in a huge chaotic system. Order as it’s viewed by humans can only exist at a small level. At a macro scale there’s nothing left but chaos. I wanted my work to bring that feeling to the viewer.