Sedan — to the limits of the city (2021)

Sedan is a city of about 16.000 inhabitants situated in the north of France, close to the Belgian border. In Spring 2021, photography festival organiser ‘Urbi & Orbi — photography biennale’ and the Luxembourgian ‘Clervaux – Cité de l’image’ invited me to be artist in residence in Sedan.
Sedan was a famous cloth-manufacturing centre in the 16th and 17th centuries and later hosted various other industries. Due to its location and prosperity, the city gained in military importance. After centuries of successful development, the city’s population started to steadily decline after the 1970s. The local council decided to study the causes of this downturn and in 2013 proposed its sustainable planning and development project (P.A.D.D.). I used two aspects mentioned in this document as a thematic guidance for this project. Neighbourhood specificity, urban sprawl and historic evolution of the city became the main threads of the series. I photographed both from the city centre to its outskirts, and from the historic quarters to new developments.