Throughout my dérive in Belleville, I aimed in finding letters of the alphabet around the neighboring area, within street signs, cracks in the concrete pavements, railings, graffiti, and colorful tiles. I came up with this idea as I was getting on the eleventh line of the Parisian metro, and I saw an “S” in the light-blue tiles that encompassed the tunnels of the subway that connected one line to the other. It was fascinating for me to see how a common object or decoration could represent something completely different. At that moment, I decided I would have looked for letters within the surroundings of Belleville and that that would have been my mission for my dérive in the North-East of Paris. This investigation not only allowed me to focus on the details that surrounded me, which I would have probably ignored if I were only strolling through the alleys, but it also challenged me in looking at usual and everyday objects in a different manner. I suddenly discovered that a curved street lamp placed upside down looks like a “J,” that the corner of a wooden blue door may represent an “L,” or how the television antennas on top of the typical Parisian roofs could potentially resemble an “F.”
After having shot pictures of the numerous letters I found around Belleville, I went to David Hockney’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. I believe this artist was an inspiration for this project, as his polaroid pieces of work helped me finalize Alphabetically Driven, my fourth map. Underneath each polaroid I included the name of the street in which the photograph was taken, in order for the observers of my piece of work to find that letter again in the future. From the polaroids I developed a video, which includes all of the alphabet in a uniform manner.
I believe a dérive has to be experience by everyone at least once in a lifetime, and I genuinely hope this project will not only open people’s minds and allow them to look at something from a different perspective, but also encourage them to practice the action of ‘drifting away.’
Final
Process
