1. Grisolles POV
Grisolles,
A small town on the edge of the suburbs, a road junction, a car-centric landscape, invisible heritage, and distorted reflections.
My gaze upon a village once known as "Little Church" can only rest through car bodies, windows, windshields, and other reflective surfaces that make up the automotive skin.
The car, an object of fantasy for me, of desire, of culture, and a topic of conversation for those who have stayed to live there, occupies all spaces—physical, visual, and social—in Grisolles.
There is no possibility for alternative mobility: walking is nothing more than a leisurely stroll, the bus just passes through, and by bike, everything seems too far. The car has settled in people's minds as indispensable, and the village seems haunted by its sometimes psychedelic power of attraction.
Once the barrier of social distancing from this precious possession is crossed, a part of the village reappears, slightly distorted in its appealing reflections. The object that once felt invasive becomes a medium, inviting us to look at parts of the village that perhaps we hadn’t noticed before. Industrial technical language blends with that of urban planning, architecture, construct management, and nature. The lintels overlap with the windshield wipers, the 19th-century market hall doubles around a fuel hatch, the curve of a hood cuts through a sign, a trunk kaleidoscopes the church, and a rearview mirror dresses in the sky, forgetting anachronisms.