Vincent Bitaud – Sleeping Beauties
Airports are some of the most secured public areas in the world. Dedicated to transit during the day, they turn into huge empty warehouses at night, where people waiting for their connection or early flights, and unable to afford a hotel room, try to find some sleep.
Train stations are located downtown, and therefore there are always some remnants of nightly activities inside or around them. Being disconnected from the city, airports are on the other hand a world apart where silence and absence of motion preside.
Through this work, I am trying to convey the eerie feeling that was always my silent partner during those many hours I spent wandering in airports. Every single night, a place dedicated to welcome thousands of people in motion turn into its exact opposite, and was never designed to be seen or even used like this. A perfect anomaly.
Light remains the principal character in this project. Clinical and blinding, oppressive for some and soothing for others, it leaves no place for concealment, and projects the visitor into an overwhelming sense of vacuity and absence. Artificial lights drawing the sleeping out of the shadowy enclaves they are used to; energy wastage subjugated to the security obsession : it is here that two fundamental contemporary preoccupations of our time collide head on.
www.laritournelle.com and on flickr.