Risk Areas

At the start of this project was the fiction novel, that I had worked at for many years when I was living in France. It’s about natural disasters and the settings take place in different parts of the United States which because of its vastness and various climatic phenomena across the country. I used non-fiction events and places within a fictional story; however, I remained in Paris and never physically traveled to these places while writing the book.

Years later, a dramatic event took place in my personal life and I found myself unable to further enjoy fiction. I found myself unable to open a novel, to read, to write, it did not work anymore, I did not believe the stories that were told to me or that I tried to tell.At the time of this personal tragedy I had been living in the United States for 3 years. I came to live in Chicago with my wife and my daughter at that time and worked as a visual arts teacher, another project appeared in front of me: I needed to go to the places I used in my fiction, to see these places, experience them, the traces of these dramas that I had exploited to feed my novel. What had I hoped to find there? I had no idea, but it suddenly seemed essential to me that the story of these experiences had to complete my initial project, my fiction needed to impact my reality. 

The non-fiction part echoes the fiction part by talking about the places I see and experience, as well as the dramas that took place there. The subject of the novel is the story of a character named Mat who at one point feels unable to take new risks in his life, when one day he is forced to take new functions in his profession which feels torturously ill-fitting: he has to go to the four corners of the country to expertise scenes of disasters due to natural phenomena. The stagnant state to which the character aspires is a reflection of his deep fears, and these sinister scenes are actually mirrors that he is unable to look at - so he has to find a way to deal with this new situation. 

Not only do the photographs play an illustrative role in the project; In this case he makes the crazy decision to not go to the scenes of disasters but rather to recreate at his home some miniature scenes in wooden boxes. He then takes photographs of certain details of these scenes and attaches them to false reports from the little information he has on the victims of these dramatic events. This artistic work he does is in place of involving himself in the reality of these disastrous events. A personally heavy function of his job that he just can’t get himself to complete.

So, I actually created the Shadow Boxes that the character Mat created in the book. I started working on these Shadow Boxes a few years ago during my first trip. I quickly decided to create them in real life. At the time when I went to the first trip linked to the project, it seemed logical to build them partially with the natural materials found onsite. For example, in theseries onthesinkholein Florida an unlucky man named Jeff was suddenly swallowed by a hole that opened under his bed while he was sleeping. For this series I took dirt from the ground at the site of this tragedy 

The shadow boxes in this artistic project are a sort of door between reality and fiction, they belong to both worlds, as do the photographs. These elements have become a visual art project on its own meant for exhibiting and works independently from the book. There are fifty-two shadow boxes and there are one hundred and four photographs.

In the end, the fictional part of the book opened a doorway to a broader artistic process and to my personal response to life events, risk and distance.

Olivier BODART