SEASON : SPRING / YEAR : 2022 / PHOTOS : @tomhgn_ / VIDEO : @23_productionss 

CHAPTER 1 - EDUCATION

Day 1: So here we are, I have passed over to the other side. "A good trip" he told me. All my life I've been zigzagging, I was bound to slip at some point. I'm not even scared, I'm not even stressed. The stroll? A courtyard filled with beautiful stories, dark looks that hide more fear than anger. There's nothing worse than fear, it's unpredictable. I try to remember where it all began, despite my good education. My first memories of violence are of those afternoons in the playroom. My father would let me beat those damned moles for hours. I was six years old, so whacking things with a hammer was a great way to focus my hyperactivity. 10 years later, it was bricks flying past bakers faces, smashing into the dashboards of civilians' Mondeos. What could be better than smashing police car windshields to focus all of that energy that was locked up in my sixteen year old body? History always repeats itself. Maybe I'm not such a nice guy after all.

 

CHAPTER 2 - SONS OF VX

Day 35: I miss skateboarding. The city outings, drinking on steps, fighting, the smell of piss. I've been roaming these streets since I was 11 years old, looking for vices and adrenaline. But what's left of all that? A couple of analog photos and a memory weakened by my THC fogged neurons. If only we had something to film it all with. In those days, our mobile phones only had limited functions. To put together and save footage, you couldn't just click a few keys on a tactile screen. I remember the six step high flip I did when I was only 4'6 tall and just turned 12. That day, I couldn't have imagined that a few weeks later it would be recorded over by wedding footage of the guy whose camera we borrowed. The image of those wasted thirty-somethings-year-olds, dancing the conga will haunt me forever. God damned VX... We really did love that tape. The charm of its blurriness, its constant dust, the whole of the nineties compiled into this one little object. Let's praise it like we should and save its memory.

 

CHAPTER 3 - BREAKFAST

Day 60: Looking back on it, my cell is not dissimilar to my first 18 square meter studio, minus the love affairs and hammered parties. Staring down at today's meal (over cooked pasta floating in its famous sauce of water), I miss my mother's Sunday lunches. They always had a particularly special taste after having spent the night at an after-party taking all sorts of hard drugs. With my numb body, my fetid breath and acid refluxes, my massive pupils felt as big as the over portioned plate of spaghetti in front of me. There was nothing better than their al dente texture and herbed sauce to send me off into a psychedelic nap of nightmares and orinic consciousness. Maybe I do miss drugs a little...

CHAPTER 4 - DARKNESS

Day 100: So here we are, the absence of soft curves hidden behind light fabrics is seriously weighing on my mind. I had finished PornHub, and the final boss put my last experiences to shame. I tried to remember my first girlfriend. She probably only has very few memories of me, but that evening at the cinema was a marking point in my teenage-hood. Room 9, the lights slowly dimmed and opened the gates to long drooly snogging, discovering the female body with my wandering hands whilst listening to a badly dubbed Hollywood take on flying spaceships and a Stalinist dictatorship. At an age where we are too young to go out partying and too old to believe in storks, these dark rooms of the seventh art turn into kingdoms of discovery of the senses. The fantasized pornos that soothed us since the beginning of puberty are light years away from the sensations I discovered that evening.

 

CHAPTER 5 - EASY MONEY

Day 120: "Easy money", what an expression to define particularly tricky ways of getting rich. The capital risk, the art and manor, the rules of the street, the snitches... so many factors to control to avoid uncomfortable situations. A broken car window marked the start of my delinquency. A car radio sold for 50€. A slim profit considering all the hassle it cost its owner, who probably needed the dosh more than I did. But it was all just a game. The adrenaline, the cat, the mouse, these gloomy past experiences at least taught me one thing: easy money is when you have fun doing the job.

CHAPTER 6 - MIXTAPE

Day 150: A compilation on a CD-R, nothing could be more nostalgic to dive me into decades of memories. It was around about 1998, after having been raised listening to rock by my father, that rap entered my life. From that day on I watched it evolve despite my wishes. Unfortunately in order to survive, its sound had to change with the generations. The annihilation of its physical form, replaced by unlimited streaming, allowed an excessive consumption, like at a self-service buffet where quantity rules and no one educates their palate to the different senses of each dish. But like all meals, if we look closely at all the ingredients, whether we grew up with AKH's poetry or PNL's auto-tuned voices, each recipe from the last 25 years is filled with its own little wonders. And when we look at the range of the menu, we realize the infinite possibilities that this movement has yet to offer us.