Le Chant des chantiers

For a year, Inès Barros followed three major building sites: a bridge, a library, a railway line. She writes and she photographs, and the book lives in the back-and-forth between the two — the text carries the long time, the image seizes the present of a gesture. Barros is interested neither in the plans nor in the openings but in work in the making, in that song of the building sites which is the coordinated noise of hundreds of people. She shows the fatigue, the waiting, the precision of a formwork done right. Neither praise of progress nor easy critique: an attention to the collective at the moment it produces something lasting. Placed between the house's two collections, the book connects them: as much narrative as photography, it pulls focus on the same subject from both sides. What is built there exceeds each one, and exists only through all.