Mais pour qui la pierre se prend-elle?
ENSP Arles - École nationale supérieure de la photographie
Year II | MA Photography
2025
Departmental Museum of Ancient Arles
July 7 to November 2, 2025 | from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
From the collections of the Arles Antique Departmental Museum, its history, and its geographical location, fictional stories have emerged, carried by a group of students from the National School of Photography.
Archaeological objects, historical fragments, archives, collections, and excavation memories become the starting points for an imaginary exploration. Using photography, writing, sound, and video, students combine the distant past with contemporary issues to produce fictions deeply rooted in reality.
Inspired by Donna Haraway's "speculative fabrications," the project invites us to think with ruins: not as frozen remains, but as living, active materials capable of engaging with our current concerns. It is about inhabiting the interstices between science and fiction, between truth and invention, and making established knowledge vibrate through contact with invented stories.
Ancient objects are no longer just silent witnesses to a bygone past; they become accomplices of a present in crisis, allies of a thought that seeks to connect, disturb, and renew our ways of seeing and inventing narratives from other perspectives. This artistic and critical approach questions our way of telling stories, producing knowledge, and transmitting multiple memories. It proposes a sensitive reactivation of heritage, a weaving of possible narratives to inhabit our uncertain times differently.
An exhibition by the Arles Antique Departmental Museum in partnership with the City of Architecture and Heritage and labeled Arles Associate ( Arles Photography Meetings )
Installation of Lazy Gods and Lazy Fate in the Arles Antique Departmental Museum
ARTISTS
General coordination | Oualid Lazrak and Yannick Vernet (ENSP) with the participation
of Luce Lebart
Teeradon THONGSAARD and Hugo JACQ
And Rotonus never fell
Marion HAMIEZ
Is it stone or a ghost?
Fédéri LAURENS
Future ancient oilman
Audrey BORJA
Points of Memory, film, 2025
Jan Oliver HEISE
Shipwreck
Soyan ISSA
Aethiopes
Alexander Dimitrios Papadopoulos
Lazy Gods and Lazy Fate
Idriss Bayou
2150, year of Algeria
LAZY GODS AND LAZY FATE
Lazy Deities and Lazy Fate—developed with the support of Yannick Vernet and the Musée départemental Arles antique—explores the Alyscamps necropolis as a paradigm of the tension between life and death. Through images and sound, the work seeks to transform archaeological relics into autonomous, living entities, engaging them in dialogue with humans, environments, and other species.
The necropolis, long reduced to a space of death, now appears as a threshold: a liminal zone where memory and oblivion, sacredness and abandonment, coexist. Swallowed by an ever-expanding urban fabric, its sacred and social values seem erased—yet paradoxically, this very marginality grants it renewed vitality. Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Pasolini’s Teorema, the Alyscamps reflects how the sacred often emerges in the periphery, challenging modernity’s logic of growth and utility.
The project reactivates this space within the museum, confronting a dichotomy: between the lost sacredness of ritual sites and the modern impulse to preserve by isolating and sealing them. In doing so, it points to a broader crisis of values, where memory and shared spaces are eroded by relentless expansion.
Methodologically, the work combines documentation of necropolises, both within and beyond the city, with archival research, constructing a layered corpus of sonic, visual, and textual materials. The final form is a polyphonic installation: relics supported by skeletal metal arms, images dissolving into cycles rather than fixed moments, and sound compositions creating a ritual rhythm of repetition and return. Alongside it, a book serves as a quieter architecture, preserving the project’s complexity across pages.
Lazy Deities and Lazy Fate proposes the necropolis as a mirror of contemporary fractures: a suspended frontier where life and death, past and future, coexist. It seeks not resolution, but a space where memory, wound, and sacredness persist—fragile, fractured, and yet still alive.
Lazy Deities and Lazy Fate—developed with the support of Yannick Vernet and the Musée départemental Arles antique—explores the Alyscamps necropolis as a paradigm of the tension between life and death. Through images and sound, the work seeks to transform archaeological relics into autonomous, living entities, engaging them in dialogue with humans, environments, and other species.
The necropolis, long reduced to a space of death, now appears as a threshold: a liminal zone where memory and oblivion, sacredness and abandonment, coexist. Swallowed by an ever-expanding urban fabric, its sacred and social values seem erased—yet paradoxically, this very marginality grants it renewed vitality. Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Pasolini’s Teorema, the Alyscamps reflects how the sacred often emerges in the periphery, challenging modernity’s logic of growth and utility.
The project reactivates this space within the museum, confronting a dichotomy: between the lost sacredness of ritual sites and the modern impulse to preserve by isolating and sealing them. In doing so, it points to a broader crisis of values, where memory and shared spaces are eroded by relentless expansion.
Methodologically, the work combines documentation of necropolises, both within and beyond the city, with archival research, constructing a layered corpus of sonic, visual, and textual materials. The final form is a polyphonic installation: relics supported by skeletal metal arms, images dissolving into cycles rather than fixed moments, and sound compositions creating a ritual rhythm of repetition and return. Alongside it, a book serves as a quieter architecture, preserving the project’s complexity across pages.
Lazy Deities and Lazy Fate proposes the necropolis as a mirror of contemporary fractures: a suspended frontier where life and death, past and future, coexist. It seeks not resolution, but a space where memory, wound, and sacredness persist—fragile, fractured, and yet still alive.
176 pages
21x31cm
coptic binded
