La forêt souterraine

Architect: Christian Drevet
Sponsor: Sytral

The metro, like any public space, is endowed with images, among other things through advertising displays. In metro stations, underground places, the light box has become commonplace.
Other images presented together would gain nothing by denying this context. It will therefore be a question of using a similar vehicle, of which we will be careful to reconsider the positioning on the wall of each platform.
These luminous images will be pieces of landscape taken with a photographic camera in different easily recognizable sites, such as the mountain, the seaside, the forest, the countryside, each of these places charged with different meanings (the sublime, the exaltation , tranquility...) but recomposing, according to a meticulous reorganization on each platform wall, a kind of global landscape, the empty spaces being filled imaginarily by the spectators placed on the opposite platform.

If the artifice is luminous and vertical, the memory, for its part, will be dense and anchored in the ground. As such, it will be supported by cast iron plates, engraved in flat relief, embedded in the material of the floor opposite the light boxes.

On each platform: 8 light images, photographs transferred to Duratrans and placed in the light boxes on the platform walls. 4 will be placed at eye level (base 120 cm from the ground); 2 will be placed at the top of the wall (base 270 cm from the ground); 2 will be placed at the foot of the wall (base 30 cm from the ground).

The position of the advertising images is planned within this installation. 8 cast iron plates, with texts engraved in flat relief, embedded in the ground. One plate per image, located directly above it and more or less far from the wall depending on whether the corresponding image is higher or lower. Thus, to consider an image located higher, the spectator will have to step back until he finds himself on the corresponding plate.