Attraction-Repulsion, 2021–2022

Since 2007, Claire Fasulo has been creating the series Wanderings for which she brings together the spaces, atmospheres, and situations that oppress her and that she decides to confront. Attraction-Repulsion is part of this same approach. 

After the first lockdown, as the world struggled to get back on track, carnival workers set up shop on Lille’s Champ de Mars Esplanade. Given the health situation, few were in the mood to celebrate. It was amid this sparse crowd that Claire Fasulo decided to focus her lens. Alone in the nearly empty aisles of the fair, the photographer attempted to capture that suspended moment where the garish colors, the scent of sugar, and the laughter clash with the heaviness of the moment. 

In her photographs, the artificial lights of the empty attractions cut sharply against the sky. They emerge like mirages in the vastness of the desert. To accompany this photographic series, Claire Fasulo has composed a soundtrack in which the sounds escaping from the party intertwine with the beating of her anxious heart. The atmosphere is heavy, and the 16:9 aspect ratio that Claire Fasulo borrows from cinema heightens her distance from the photographed subject. We find ourselves on a fault line, caught between the two, at the heart of the oxymoron, unable to know which feeling to trust. 

↘︎ Text by Camille Bardin, independent art critic and exhibition curator,  member of the Jeunes Critiques d’Art collective