Benoit Fournier
Babylon
November 2–December 3, 2017
“The favela is an organic construction where people have informally occupied the land, and it is relentlessly changing and growing. Its atmosphere is linked to the experience of walking through Babylon’s winding paths, and at the same time, to the movement of that evolving space. My work draws inspiration from this very movement, from this random architecture with its own imperfections.”
In Babylon, Benoit Fournier takes viewers on a journey that treads the line between fact and fiction to encounter the Brazilian favela of of the same name. The artist has lived in Babylon, one of the oldest favelas in Rio De Janeiro, since 2013, where he continues to find beauty in the constant expansion and makeshift architecture surrounding him. For this series, Fournier brings together imagery made using digital and pinhole cameras, drawing us into a world that is both real and imagined, and familiar yet surreal.
Benoit Fournier was born in 1981 in Carpentras, France. He holds a Master’s degree in international business administration with a focus on Latin America. He has lived in Mexico and Spain, and in 2006 he traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where he currently resides. He recently published City of Bandeira (Batel) and Water Memories (Andrea Jakobsson), and he is currently working on a monograph of Babylon with Madalena Estudio. Babylon is Fournier’s first solo show in the United States.