.TIFF 2023 - Fabrice Schneider - Hors Sol

In Hors-sol, Fabrice Schneider takes an interest in the relationship between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of a city. He tries to show what facades and street corners tell about the urban society, its economy, its conflicts and psychology. The photographs collected in Hors-Sol were taken in the different cities where the artist lived or stayed between 2013 and 2019: Paris, Brussels, Bilbao, Malaga, Chamonix.

Hors-sol focuses on the representation of climbing in advertising and business when it is used to illustrate ​​success, performance, and pushing one’s limits. This representation, perfectly integrated in the capitalist system, shapes our imagination deeply. The book also observes how urban graffiti exploits the idea of ascension specific to mountain sports that are reserved to the privileged. The concept ​​of the individualistic self-made man, from the young executive to the graffiti artist, is shown to collide with the horizontality of anti-homeless devices and sidewalks.

A text by art writer and editor Piero Bisello delves into Fabrice Schneider's work in Hors-sol, proposing a further dialectic between written language and the long sequence of images devoid of captions and comments.