Das französisch-deutsche Künstler Duo Lucie & Simon zeigt uns mit ihrem ausgezeichneten Projekt „Silent World„, wie die größten Metropolen und pulsierendsten Orte der Welt erscheinen würden, wenn (fast) keine Menschenseele zu sehen ist. Egal ob in New York, Beijing, Paris oder Rom: Überall ausgestorbene Plätze, verlassene Großstädte und ungewöhnliche Einblicke in eine vollkommen ruhige Welt – so wie wir sie selbst vermutlich niemals erleben werden.

In the Silent World project, we wanted to study and transform our world’s most symbolic metropolises into imaginary, fictional, impossible places. In our work, we always try to study and put into image the frontier between reality and the world of dreams. Our desire was to put the viewers into a puzzling and uncomfortable place, pushing him to put into question notions of time and space, but mostly our role and position towards the becoming of our world.

From a technical point of view, we wanted to do a project mixing two periods of History of Photography. The beginning of Photography’s techniques in the 19th century by realizing a single very long exposure image of several hours. This way all elements in movement (cars, persons, etc) disappear. We developed a black filter for our camera, which is usually used in Astronomy for analyzing stars and space and which doesn’t allow the camera to receive enough light, therefore needs several hours to record one image.

From their on, we do „classical“ images of a fraction of a second, and start working on the computer for several days mixing all these details so that the final image looks like a instant, an frozen moment stolen from an imaginary world.