12 September 2000: I am fifty, chatting under a lime tree, and there’s a lot of noise—insects and the wind making it hard to hear our small talk about the weather or tonight’s menu. That’s how I used to imagine the unimaginable in the 1980s: the year 2000, turning fifty’. The unsettling thing about fast-forwarding into the Great Unknown of the future is the fateful permanence of sensations and things: as long as the world exists, things will be more or less the same. Summer 2550 in Champassak—it was 2007 in Santiago de Cuba, counting the 543- year lead of the Buddhist calendar. Wielding years and centuries one has never known is a little like signing away one’s future in order to soothe the painful prospect of all the time one will never see!
Bernard Faucon
 
Bernard Faucon is no longer the photographer of the mises en scène that made his reputation. He has been travelling and writing and for the first time he is showing images and texts from his past that embody his vision of time, now including thoughts on old age.
Été 2550 is the kind of exhibition you fantasise about at fifteen, a nofrills collage of all your feelings and dreams: when the circle of life is coming to an end; after the death of all genres, fine arts and photography; when all that remains is a little poetry. The images in this exhibition are resonance chambers for words - the words,
background music and colourful nursery rhymes of the “voluptuous tragedy of life”.