Cardboard Fortress

Cardboard Fortress
2019

The Smurfit Stone Container plant (New Richmond) ceased operations in 2005. The landscape is smoothed and leveled, accelerating its material disintegration on the ground and timeless in the minds and memories.

Behind a barbed-wire fence that confined the cardboard factory within its perimeter, modern society reveals itself under its current reign, transforming itself under the cogwheel of progress, in line with the values of the 21st century. We are living with globalization, the virtual economy, free-trade commodity capitalism and, paradoxically, with the partitioning of territories.

History is in the process of renewing itself. From the Maginot Line, to the schizophrenic Israeli security fence, passing in front of the American wall, there are always interstices, as in a wool knit, where migrants swarm in columns. Coded messages appear on the signs : "PRIVATE PROPERTY", "DANGER", "HIGH VOLTAGE". These vestiges take on the symbolic aspect of an empty body that the future will be able to fill in an economic game of negotiations and tariff barriers.

Facing the sun and the seductive winds, the factory was only a Mayfly. For the few hundred workers who worked there, it was a beautiful summer during which, for four decades, life experiences and the pleasures of buying flowers and chocolates were expressed.