Is God an installation of telemonitoring ?
In a world where religion is making a comeback, this photographic essay stands on the border between social and artistic photography. As well as questioning our relationship with others, these triptychs also examine our relationship with the image. This image is based on optical perspective and on Purgatory, which, thanks to the redemption of our sins, enabled the invention of free will and consequently of the individual.
Even today, despite this invention of individual responsibility, many people still experience religion as a warning system designed to prevent us from making mistakes. Would these cameras, systematically positioned to produce a bird’s-eye view, produce an image similar to that of the Middle Ages ? Would they present us with the divine point of view on the world, making God the Great Supervisor ?
Could the proliferation of prohibitions in the form of warning or prohibition signs, enforced by remote surveillance cameras, be the new version of the religious in this century, of which André Malraux said in one of his visionary flights of fancy : « the 21st century will be religious or it won’t be » ?
Living together is becoming a matter of mutual surveillance, while protecting oneself is becoming a matter of forbidding, in favor of living together that has become a matter of daily spying. Does this social pressure ensure the social control needed to spare each and every one of us the question of our individual responsibility, leading us to prefer to protect ourselves with barriers, reflections of a society increasingly barricaded in a last-ditch attempt to preserve itself from itself ?
« Protect - forbid - monitor » would define the Holy Trinity of this new religion.