Paris, April 2018. It is in the first pages of The Second Sex, “Childhood”: one of the founding events that make little girls aware of their difference (the so-called castration anxiety) is the inability to urinate standing. In 2018, there […]

They were fifteen – perhaps twenty – on the platform that day, with their blue vests, paper bundles and pencils. I saw a few of them when I arrived, sitting out of the wind, leaning over what seemed to be […]

Paris, November 2017. Going out of the studio gives an occasion to acknowledge the difference of both temperature and hygrometry between in and out. While commenting on difficulties and sensations of the day, skins are drying and wrapping up inch […]

As soon as we are born, we are saturated with inscriptions: first names and surnames given to us, sanctuarized in civil status documents, our height and weight measured while we barely breathe, the various samples and tests to which others […]

Paris, July 2018. Have you noticed the number of events on backstage? Exhibitions on the restoration of the collections here, the maintenance of contemporary works there, technicians and decorative materials visible on stage, transparent walls showing the offices of the […]

Rotterdam, August 2018. The exhibitions in the contemporary museum were disappointing, but an unexpected installation awaited as they walked into the bathroom. On each of the doors, these slogans written in English, lingua franca by excellence, almost completely obscuring the […]

Our guest : Florence Paterson Rome, november 2017. Cimitero Acattolico. No doubt the serenity of the place and the beautiful sunlight filtering through the vegetation make it a desirable last home. This “non-Catholic” cemetery near Porta San Paolo, mentioned in […]

Paris, february 2014. There is a tendency to believe that some things resist the writing powers. Irony, for example, or innuendo. Stripped of gestures and intonation, sentences would not fully bring out in their readers this fine form of understanding […]

La Rochelle, august 2011. Audit practices are now commonplace in business corporations, public institutions and administrations. Since the 1980s, the diversity of accounting devices, metrics and quality indexes, deployed in the name of the good governance of organizations, their financial […]

Paris, December 2017. The highway code states a general rule on the distribution of public space: the road is made for vehicles whereas the pavement is made for pedestrians. And parking enforcement officers take disciplinary action when somebody breaches of […]

Palma, May 2018 The order seemed simple: a cappuccino and a hot chocolate. But this apparently ordinary Majorcan bar was home to one of these new latte artists, obsessed with the surface of our favourite beverages. Also, instead of a […]

One can easily forget the immense range of games that are practiced in playgrounds. Football, marbles, tag are just the tip of the iceberg. Of all the things invented during these precious minutes of endless possibilities, the ephemeral reigns. The […]

Paris, May 2018. For most of them, it is the last trace, the one that remains as long as the ink, the pigment or the gold resist to the attacks of rain, ultra-violet and pollution. And in this cemetery, not […]

Paris, May 2018. There are erudite notation systems to record human movement, like Meunier’s steno-choreography for classical ballet, and above all labanotation for modern dance and Benesh notation. The purpose of these so-called universal descriptions is, on the one hand, […]

Paris, January 2018. Managing the multiplication of vehicle units that criss-cross cities is not an easy task. From the point of view of physical infrastructure, as well as that of the law and the signs that make it exist on […]

Issy-Les-Moulineaux, march 2018. A metal plate framed and supported by feet riveted to the ground, the whole overhung by an inscription. That’s it. The smooth, vertical surface is offered for sight. An urban furniture being part of the environment, it […]

Paris & Twitter, March 2018. In French Law, the criminal trial is one of the places where orality is sacred. You don’t skip through files in all directions, you do not spread the thousands of pages of the instruction, only […]

Paris, December 2017. You’ve been walking past this glass door every day for years. The gilded brass plate shows a Japanese name, which you have already copied on your mobile phone to make a request. Then, you were looking for […]

Second-hand records that you’re willing to buy generally share at least three criteria: they are records that you don’t already own (at a certain point, you’ll need a database you can browse on your phone to be sure), records that […]

Marseilles, June 2017. Sociologists have taught us that clothes are signs: they indicate, because of their choices, a professional role, groups of belongings or social positioning. But others have to interpret these signs, they must know what the gray suit […]

Paris, January 2018. We are used to say that the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Plantalocene, can be seen in severe discontinuities. When going across the town, the attentive passer-by may have some first indications. Paris is marbled by flood marks and, […]

During the nineteen sixties and seventies, Malick Sidibé was a busy man. During the day, he spent his time in his studio portraying the people of Bamako. Some evenings, the younger ones, who were discovering the joys of rock and […]

Singapore, february 2017. On your daily journeys, you regularly encounter stairs. In a building, a shopping mall, the subway corridors, a historic building, or even an university campus… Sometimes abrupt and high, sometimes wide and spacious, the steps naturally follow […]

Ferrare, October 2017 Some ceilings of the municipal library were magnificent, remains of a medieval and post-medieval splendor. But the interior of the Palazzo Paradiso attracted less curious tourists than academics, with its collections of rare manuscripts, still accessible on […]

Paris, December 2017. Today I am afraid to show up totally soaked at an interview, so I drop my bicycle and take the subway with you. Do you pay attention to advertisement? A little attention you say. I bet that […]

Berlin, September 2017 Extreme fluidity is one of the things that make finance such a complex world. Well, change is a quintessential quality of the mere idea of investment, the very property that allows value to be created. The price […]

In the South of France, November 2017. The psychiatric hospital is a huge 1900’s building surmounted by a bell tower. Built out of the city town, it now belongs to the vast University clinic that has renamed the district “Hôpitaux-facultés” […]

Berlin, september 2017. Abridged writing, abbreviations, acronyms stand for several words at the same time. Reducing the main thing to a few letters, the inscription is meant to design a precise and circumscribed meaning. But for all that, polysemy is […]

Bologna, october 2017. Once again facing Italian ice cream, a dilemma arises. But here, no question to wonder about 12 different chocolate mixes, only to be sure what of the true nature of the available ice cream. This double entry […]

North Adams, September 2017 In this small western Massachusetts town, the visible brick buildings no longer housed workers or toxic substances. The gigantic rooms of industrial origin had been transformed into halls for a contemporary art museum, blazed by sunlight. […]

We live in a quantified, evidence-based world in which more and more of our actions are framed by indicators and figures that support or evaluate them. Basically, our day-to-day experience increasingly looks like a mix of elementary schools where grades […]

High-speed train in the countryside, September 2017. As often nowdays, access to the train was preceded by a control at the head of the quay, the red lasers scanning the 2D identifiers. The temporarily compact crowd was transformed into authorized […]

Crosswalks are one of these rare semiotic objects that became conventional all over the world. Quite extraordinary when you think about it: an universal meaning some signs do acquire through time. Imagine the circumstances that lead to such a globalized […]