Stéphane Duroy
at Carleton-sur-mer

Unknown, the Endless Reworking of a Book 

After crisscrossing Europe for a number of years, Stéphane Duroy would take an interest in another area, the land of exile for millions of Europeans who fled Europe and its tragedies, America. In Coney Island, New York, and in Butte, Montana, he follows the symbolic path of migrants. Corresponding to their east-to-west penetration in the American territory is a gradual forgetting of the original catastrophe that made their exile necessary. Forgetting so as to continue, so as to survive. 

For Stéphane Duroy, this inexorable disappearance of landmarks, the ravages of the pioneer spirit, the cult of opportunism, the mirage of “everything’s possible” are the basis of America’s power, yet undermine it at the same time. How to gain a foothold in an America of perpetual motion, speed and convergence lines? “We, the Europeans, built the American dream, that monumental illusion each one of us pretends to believe in.” 

Stéphane Duroy will never be done with America, that accursed part of himself. He will never stop coming back to it, besotted with these lands and their wild radiance, their gloomy beauty. 

In 2007, his book Unknown published, Stéphane Duroy managed to recover some one hundred copies that would from this point on be the main subject of his work, a bottomless pit in which he can carve: paste, edit, cut, split an image, insert others, break down page space and endlessly recompose it, open a yawning gap between what has been seen and what has been imagined. Everything returns, is replayed, is recycled and reborn in books as objects to be tried out, to be worn out, methodically, one after the other, from every possible angle. Little by little an archeology takes shape, a sedimentation of raw materials that resist and escape – the narrative, the rendering, the connection, far beyond photography. With history as the playing field, the only one worth the effort.