In this future of which some marks shine down to us, yesterday was already tomorrow. Day is night and vice versa. The catastrophe already announced. “Vestiges of the Future” by Frédéric D. Oberland is a transdisciplinary expression – visual, textual, sonic – of what is about to happen, of ruin and eternity. In the opposite direction of this scenario that is a foregone conclusion: creating common ground, summoning joy and metamorphoses. Play the game, even if it means finding yourself, so that at least something happens.

The images that make up the work come from a long-term photographic (35mm) and film corpus (Super8 photograms) where hallucinated visions, mutating geographies, intimacies and embraces, uprisings and epiphanies of the living interact. Beyond the geographies and fragmented stories, the journeys of the characters – humans, animals, plants – intersect, their semantic contamination drawing the traces of an atlas without maps. Here is the hand that gropes, the hand that sees, in the middle of a matter that swallows up and spits out time. This book with its rich grammar borrows from film editing – ellipses, decomposition of movement, acceleration/deceleration – and brings together several sequences which alternate between main notebooks, image inserts and texts. Ten voices punctuate the visual story from which they draw inspiration and report on it. “Vestiges of the Future” takes the form of a polyphonic grimoire, a set of signs to decipher and arrange: if everything we had seen was what we were going to see.