The project titled Archi comble proposes to set up a visual dialogue between the architecture of the city—the diversity of its buildings— and that of an image block made up of photographs also representing architectural and sculptural forms. The only difference is that the photo- graphs present prototypes of constructions made from used packaging. For a dialogue of this kind to take the form of a broader and more concrete conversation within the city, the black and white and colour photographs will be disseminated on advertising billboards and lozenges. The use of advertising supports is here motivated by an ironic principle, which is similar to and can be understood visually as a reversal effect. Precisely insofar that this packaging, arranged and photographed like architecture, is found there where the products it is wrapped around are usually peddled, which is to say in the middle of advertising signs. This project attempts to reveal in these forms an exchange of processes somewhat condensed here into image and situation, between photography, advertising and the city. It is a question of checking off the relations of economic production and communication between these three territories in urban space. But also of revealing the major place that the city now grants the image as an integral part of its architecture, with the singular modifications that the former constantly brings to the latter’s configuration.

Paul Pouvreau