The commission

The Castille Logis Jeunes hostel offers temporary accommodation to young people, providing support and accompanying them in their social and professional integration. The hostel aims to achieve various socio-educational objectives, in particular to promote the construction of the social and cultural identities of their residents. In this context, collective space plays a particularly important role in enabling social activities to develop. In practice, the collective spaces of the Logis Jeunes Castille, located in the basement of the building, do not seem to function as designed and do not fulfil their role as "catalysts of social life" in the home. The issue of connection, the relationship with others and isolation, is at the centre of the issues raised by the residents of the Logis Jeunes.

The artwork

Fabien Rigobert suggested making a series of photographs, the protagonists of which are the residents themselves, staged inside the Castille hostel. He mixes reality and fiction, the subjects of the photographs are the residents, the settings are their living spaces, but the poses and interactions are not reconstructions borrowed from reality. There is a questioning of the representation of the subjects and their torments; the real subject is the individual and the gap that exists between identity and inner self, revealing an intimate projection. The artist stages the residents in their existential questioning and anxiety, oscillating between an attitude of withdrawal, isolation or sharing. This questioning appears in the collision of attitudes.

The protagonists are passing through, sometimes waiting for an elsewhere in every sense of the word. Because of the characters' stylised characters, each with their own social and professional identity, the interpretation of the images and therefore the fiction, gives us the feeling of an allegory, a social tale.

This work leaves a trace of the passage of the residents and their status. The photographs are installed in light boxes in the common areas of the basement of the Logis Castille hostel.

The artist

Born in 1968, Fabien Rigobert lives and works in Lille and was awarded the Altadis prize in 2003. In his previous works he begins a reflection on the relationship between the identity of the subject and that of the image. By dramatising the ordinary, he modifies the perception of the "banal" and questions the notion of reality through the staging of characters. He conducts research on the plurality of readings that images offer us, forcing the spectator to play the role of interpreter. Fabien Rigobert's photographs and videos are based on a postulate: to say as little as possible in order to lead the spectator to imagine his personal history. Fabien Rigobert's works are enigmatic, offering a plurality of readings, and are true parts of reconstructed reality.