Exhibition “TRACES: The Invisible Cities #7” – Nîmes Site

Every year for the past 28 years, the “Regards sur la Ville” photography project has documented and created a sensory and commemorative record of the city of Nîmes and its residents through visual and audiovisual artworks.

The traces of our footsteps and those of urban wildlife—cats, dogs, birds…— the traces of our everyday movements, which often run counter to the paths mapped out by urban planning software; the mysterious marks left by the forces of an underground urbanism governed by esoteric codes stand alongside the marks on walls left by political campaigns and other forms of free expression; those of signs that have now disappeared take us back to a past that is more or less erased and distant; the traces of what this city is built upon, the echoes of Protestantism’s presence that permeate Nîmes’ urban fabric—ghostly silhouettes, fleeting and ephemeral presences… all of this seems to pose the famous question from Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, *Le Vertige*: “What if our world were nothing but a vast deception? What if everything were fake?”

Les Villes Invisibles, as it has done every year since 2001, reveals the imperceptible and incomprehensible maelstrom that has gripped the city since time immemorial, making it certainly more abstract but also more tangible and dizzying than it appears.