MAXIME TAILLEZ
‘Border’
I started that work during my photography studies 2 years ago, for a simple exercise about “heterotopy”, so I worked on an old border crossing near my family house in north of France, where the customs officers facilities are now chocolate stores. Then I enlarge it to French-Belgian border, because this border is a part of my personal geography as I explain it in my introduction text. In the collective imagination, the idea of crossing a border depicts a sudden, or even brutal change of surrounding. In a globalized world, this is less and less the case, especially in the Europe of Schengen. Having lived in the north of France, I have crossed the border to Belgium so often that it seems it does not even exist anymore. For me, border areas reflect more of a personal geography than a concrete delimitation. Nevertheless, border areas are for most people a space of exchange more than a place for fast transitions. The no man’s land found around the former customs have become actual destinations dedicated to a low range tourism in low-taxes commercial areas. It’s the work that you just watch on my website, and it’s what I presented for my graduation last year, which did work well for me. Now I’m working on the french-english border, actually at Calais, where a lot of illegal immigrates try to cross the sea to England. I’m still in the beginning, this is pretty hard because the border is more administrative than geographic, and the weather really bad this winter, plus I have a shitty job to make money and pay my large format film, so time is missing… At last, I want to work about the whole french border, because each border with another country have a particular geography and history (Germany, Switzerland, Italy, etc…). So I still have a lot of work.