System Validation

Ten years of a travelling life, between restaurants with dishes watered down by routine and grim hotel rooms – their beds, always identical, sport clean sheets every evening, carefully changed by employees, and those unendingly monotonous views on the car park. Stéphane Winter’s only equipment is his everyday life as a consultant. He provides insight into a life far removed from home, where nobody knows you and where the only landmark is the hotel room, differing between cities, whose only solace is to never surprise in its neutrality. The artist took thousands of photographs during his various professional travels, some of them cynical portraits and some self-portraits, in which the character he performs – a stranger in a business suit – occupies a space that is difficult to own and re-enacts, as performer, his own boredom. The camera is a means to evade loneliness, to stage the absence of action, to turn boredom into play.

Text : Rebecca Topakian

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