Your two latest series clearly go beyond the question of representation, into that of the communicational act. Taking their origins in facts that belong to History, they exploit the mechanism of transfer from real facts to information.

For some years I've been interested in the images of firms, and the industrial conflicts that are so prominent, with the result that codes related to communication (brands, signs, hoardings) naturally found their way into my work. The reference points that embedded these images in current events were gradually forced out by a modelling process. Their interpretation, more than that of their predecessors, takes place in "the historical", but it's history's "transformation into images" that interests me, in the first place, and particularly scenes of protest, in that they develop complexity, a system that exposes language.

One of the most obvious signs of this "transformation into images" – this theatricalisation – is the slogan, for example in the series Du fric ou boum ["Cash or boom"].

What this series is concerned with is a transfer from the real fact to its staging. In order for an image to actualise a fact, in the continuous flux of the visual, it must "play" the fact and give it a form that will condition its interpretation. The media image that makes the slogan public combines language and image in the same space.
The slogan has a well-defined role to play in conflict situations. It enunciates claims, and expresses states of mind. It can be violent, funny, despairing... But taken out of context, it has an evocative power that goes beyond its original function. It can be an historical touchstone, like Il est interdit d'interdire ["It's forbidden to forbid"], or an odd phrase that may be freely interpreted by the viewer, such as Tiens t'es radié ["Hey, you're out"].

From the slogan to the personal apprehension of a space, in Sentimentale Intellektuelle, there's a question of occupation, in other words an incorporation of individual histories into present time.

The slogan's a free form of integration of an individual or group into collective space. More than an object of transmission or media exposure, it's become a "mediatisation". Du fric ou boum essentially explores images of the alert as a crude form of communication, the dramatisation of a threat rather than a threat as such. Within this logic, On veut la prime ["We want the bonus"] is the most representative photograph.
In other words, injecting these images into public advertising space seems to me to be a further perversion that's interesting to use. With the photographs of cells in Sentimentale Intellektuelle, my approach was different. The world of prisons involves the absorption of individuals into a place that's been chosen by society. It's a locus of constraint, of common usages, of authority. Here, the individual's made manifest by his quasi-absence.

In Sentimentale Intellektuelle, the historical referent seems like a necessary starting point that was also very quickly left behind by the question of mediation – or mediatisation.

Taking the history of the 1970s as a basis for reflection, the transmission of political commitment always has to be put in perspective. In France, it's May '68, and the particular relationship we have with demonstrations... In Germany, I thought it more appropriate to look at a different form of opposition through the activity of the Red Army Faction and its major figures: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, etc. Beyond the confrontation between the state and an armed group, the most interesting thing was the war they waged in the media, and particularly in Stammheim prison, which for some years was a centre for debate and mutual manipulation, appealing to public opinion. Closed in on itself, it has given rise to collective fantasies. And this was the central point around which I gradually constructed the project.

How does the treatment of prisoners' individual experience come into this neutralising process ?

I asked the prison authorities if I could send the prisoners a questionnaire in the form of a strict protocol. I asked them to give a simple description of the space around them, and its constituents. "What are its dimensions ? What colour is the floor? What is there on the wall ?" And so on. Six of them sent back replies, and I used their descriptions as a basis for the production of maquettes, which were then photographed.
This is a setup that abstracts the position of the individual. It makes the prisoner's presence indispensable to the implementation of the work. His viewpoint determines that of the viewers, but the position it assigns them also makes them invisible. In terms of its inner workings, the series doesn't seek to deal with the private aspect of the prisoners' lives. On the contrary, the point was to enter into the domain of "the intimate", as Mickaël Foessel defined it, in other words as a linkage to exteriority¹. By its very nature, prison takes this away from the individual, who, as far as possible, projects it onto the walls and impregnates his day-to-day life with it. And it's in this respect that prison's a political space.

Your work has to do with the circulation of images rather than their origins, and you've taken this context as a new impetus to modelling (whose status, in your work, is methodological as much as conceptual). Your initial drawings and paintings of very precise details had storyboards without actors, and gave shape to an absent reality.

Without actors, and without narration... Let's say that the place became a generator of images from different origins – archives or fiction. Redrawing sets from Uli Edel's film Das Baader Meinhof Komplex, and with photographs that closely reframed objects from everyday life, or from prisons, I put together a group of neutral elements that didn't describe the context of a story, but constituted a corpus with multiple, and increasingly autonomous, entry points.

In the transfers that take place within this project, and in the relationships between the different media, the question of representation, or simulacra, becomes irrelevant: it's the more general format of the contemporary image that's in question. So without being really habitable, these different works exert a strong, disturbing power over the viewer.

It's true that I felt it important to maintain an interlinking of readings between the various media used in Sentimentale Intellektuelle. But for me, the heart of the work is still to be found in the photographic reconstitution of the maquettes, partly because the use of photography creates a form of continuity with my work as a whole, but also because it gives a more accurate expression of the ambiguity between fantasy and reality. All the images have the same referent, but in this case photography's performing an "action". It's discovering an autonomy it never before possessed. The other elements are in a sense satellites with different roles: the drawings and paintings weave a tissue of images that blur and intensify the relationship to the place of reference. The two "cell" sculptures, as deployable, manipulable spaces, once more display the attraction of modelling, evoking the proportions of the two types of cell that are to be found in Stammheim. Through the interior-exterior relationship, they convey the experience of utilisation, gesture and sound. And finally, in the same logic as Du fric ou boum, the video Everybody talks about the weather... gives new life to the slogan, which has already been appropriated several times as a demonstration of the scope and autonomy of language.