http://www.barron.fr/

LE NOUVEAU VOYAGE from Stephan BARRON on Vimeo.

In Le Nouveau voyage, Stéphan Barron sets out to follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather in Languedoc-Roussillon.

110 years after his ancestor’s travels, following the same routes but on Google Earth, Stéphan Barron updates, relives, revisits, and emotionally reinvents this journey.

This work is presented as a large-scale installation at FRUC, but can also be viewed on 3G phones and the internet.

To highlight this historical, geographical, and artistic approach, Stéphan Barron uses a medium that is accessible to everyone and symbolic of our era of instantaneity and mobility: the phone connected to geographic information systems.

Anyone can also go to google.maps and google.earth to follow this route from above, via satellite.

In Google / maps / search window, type “Le nouveau voyage” (The New Journey).

The viewer of this New Journey returns to places visited more than a century ago.

By combining Louis Barron’s original text and letting his imagination and reverie create his own new journey.

This New Journey is not just a personal endeavor by Stéphan Barron. It allows everyone to connect with the places of yesterday and today and to see what has changed and what remains.

This contemporary work of art also invites everyone to think about the places their ancestors passed through. What were their landscapes and stories? In this era of travel and migration, this is a question we all share. In our lives, we are all driven to question our roots: our family history, what we will pass on to our children and all those who follow. In our lives, we seek our identity, and our memory is an essential part of this. It is like a link that comes from time and goes towards time.

By comparing the two journeys, the two works, each of us can make this inner journey to the sources of ourselves.

By reading the works of Louis Barron, Stéphan Barron discovers the personality of this mythical ancestor through writing. Through his research, he pieces together the elements of a life

This work also questions progress: how has it changed travel? How do we move through space and time? How have our relationships with travel and immediacy evolved? Our technologies have changed our daily lives, and art expresses this changing reality.

Louis Barron’s books highlight the social evolution of the region, the cultural importance of a particular city, the social habits of workers and all inhabitants… Through his particularly relevant ethnological, sociological, and historical testimony, Louis Barron shows that he is a committed author who is deeply concerned with the lives of ordinary people.