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Ecology, intimacy, resistance: the refuge as a metaphor.

An abandoned farm, a forest shelter, a summer sheepfold. Buildings made long ago for protection from the elements, but also from others. Some of these refuges seem about to give way to a disaster under way or still to come. Others have already given way, and all that is left of them is thousands of deadly confetti blown about by misfortune. Here a fire seems to rage behind the first trees of the clearing, there the roof of a house seems to catch fire. Only a few pockets of hope seem to remain: a cloud made of dreams, or a giant firefly (which looks unreal in such a place).

The title of the series comes from a Fugees song, You can run but you can't hide, of which I only kept the first half. The second half stays unsaid, and it sets the tone for the whole: every escape, every struggle is an illusion. That says it all.

In each image of the series, something is happening without us really knowing what. I leave this uncertainty on purpose, because the series can be read in several ways and these readings overlap, which lets everyone project their own story onto it.

The first reading continues my previous work, in which I question our relationship with nature through landscape. Here the hut stands for humankind and what it has built to protect itself, while everything around it is burning: the forest goes up in smoke, the trees die, and we die with them. These often apocalyptic scenes give a feeling of things falling apart, as if the certainties we lean on were starting to crack.

There is also a more intimate reading. These small buildings are often little more than a bedroom, the place of refuge above all others. Here nothing can happen to you, you are safe. Except you are not.
As a child, I was that refuge surrounded by flames: I thought I was safe and protected, while the wolf was already in the fold. Today I say: "this is what I went through, this is what others go through". Drawing what I felt is a way to understand it and to heal. Breaking the silence is telling the other: "I believe you".

And then these huts speak of a simpler dream, that of having a home of my own. I have only ever lived in other people's places, and I often look at property listings, the ones that make you dream and that you will never have. Behind this dream is the wish to find, one day, the safe place I missed so much as a kid. There is also something in this gesture that all the children in the world share: drawing your house or building a hut is a way of making a place of your own, where you feel protected.

The series began in the Vercors, with a first try at the Plainet hut in July 2026. I then put it to the test in the Jura, where I made five more huts for the Biennale du Jura, Ateliers en Zig Zag. The full project is being built in the Vercors, where I went back in October 2026 for two weeks of walking. I chose this massif first because it has many unguarded huts. I already knew some of them from sleeping there on hikes. The regional natural park maintains them, but they mostly work thanks to a kind of collective intelligence: everyone leaves their leftover food for whoever arrives hungry, or carries up a few candles for the next ones.

It is also a landscape I have known since childhood. My grandfather had a second home in Autrans, and I went on many mountain outings there, from the ridges of the Gerbier to the Grand Veymont and the Mont Aiguille, including a mountain bike crossing, the deer rut at Ambel and skiing at Villard-de-Lans.

Finally, the Vercors is a place loaded with history. In 1944 the massif was a stronghold of the Resistance: the hamlet of Valchevrière was burned down and Vassieux was bombed. Resistance fighters found refuge in these same sheepfolds and shelters, where they were later hunted down. I am fascinated by the choice to resist that some were able to make at that time, and I wanted to pay tribute to them in my own way, through the landscape and the places they lived in. This idea of resistance also joins the other readings of the series: the nature that burns, the intimacy we defend, the refuge we look for.