Urban Distortion

Question: How to show man by his absence in the premises of his own creation?

In 2013, the architecture firm AS Architecture Studio commissioned Wenger to produce a report on the construction site of the Maison de la Radio in Paris, which allowed him to delve deeply into the nature of a construction site.

The building itself, with its many floors and ramifications, is structurally difficult to survey and has a powerful monumental effect on people. At the moment of the core renovation, the reinforced concrete skeleton became visible, revealing a certain vulnerability. Construction sites are permanent fields of change: every centimetre of the architecture is worked on, material chipped away and applied, transformed and redefined. This vulnerability is palpable in Wenger's photographic reportage and allows for a certain intimacy. As a still life, Wenger captures this atmospheric moment between strength and woundedness.

Massive steel girders lie in the midst of chaos without any static purpose, covered by soft snow; complex static grids stand for pure functionality, cranes carry, scaffolding supports. The lone swivel chair and the small fire extinguisher seem out of place and lost. Wenger portrays the chaos of a building site with great sensitivity, like a social mirror. Always in upheaval, always in motion, it finds its omnipresence in the pictorial absence of man. Each object stands for its own narrative and speaks to our collective pictorial memory. In the individual reenactment, the still lifes complete themselves into the hustle and bustle of a building site, but linger in their autonomous aesthetic as a moment between destruction and construction.

The images were subsequently exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale alongside Valérie Jouve and Zhenfei Wang.

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