2025
Video mapping
Video Mapping Festival / Béthune / FR / 24.05.2025
Inspired by the recent history of Béthune and the Hauts-de-France region, this mapping transposes the region’s mining past into a device where words, rather than coal, are the material to be extracted.
Playing with new media codes—social network interface, generative AI, alt text—the work stages an excavation in the sediments of contemporary images taken from a photo library: selfies, screenshots, still lifes, and vernacular photographs… Gradually, these images give way to their textual descriptions, which are progressively refocused on the landscapes of Hauts-de-France.
They converge on the image of a « black mountain », a reference to the mine dump, yesterday’s waste that has become a characteristic feature of the contemporary landscape of the region. The mine dump here does not refer to a precise location, but is generated by AI, creating an imaginary, digital representation of these artificial hills.
Like a mining operation, a sentence rises to the surface: Beyond invisible walls, images defend memory from fading. The words themselves are extracted, fragmented, and then reassembled in the form of a shifting deposit. Ultimately, this is what this mapping is about: reactualising the memory of a place through images.
Produced by Rencontres Audiovisuelles
Sound design by Gabriele Stera
Presented on 24.05.2025 on the façade of the Office de tourisme in Béthune, as part of the Video Mapping Festival 2025.
Project by Martina Stella
Produced by Rencontres Audiovisuelles
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