Losing Ground

Isabelle Hayeur’s work is situated within an ecological and urbanist critique. Having lived in the suburbs for twenty years, she witnessed the spectacle of urban sprawl and the many disappearances that go along with it. Marked by this experience, her approach is informed by environmental concerns and issues of land use and regional development…

Since the lake 1990s, she has been articulating a critique of urban sprawl and the resulting erosion and homogenization of the countryside across the world. With its negation of city history, of geographic particularities, and thus of cultural memory, this standardized urbanization imposes its amnesia, individualistic lifestyle, and jarring presence in nature… This world has become malleable, subject to our will, to our imaginations; more than ever, it bears the identifying imprint of our developed societies.

Losing Ground sounds out recently man-made territories so as to decipher humanity’s relationships with the environment and, more profoundly, to shed light on contemporary forms of existence and modes thought. It confronts us with the dizzying spectacle of our diminishing local references, as they give way to cultural stereotypes, now become universal through globalisation.