YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE イヴ・マルシャン＆ ロマ・メェッフェル

In The Shape of What Remains, Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre chart a journey through modern ruins. They do so by working within the old Jushin Kaikan dormitory, where empty rooms amplify the echo of disused buildings that have fascinated them for more than 20 years.

Their approach took shape in 2002 in the south of Paris, during their first explorations of abandoned places. The astonishment they felt when faced with the heritage weight of certain sites quickly transformed that initial excitement into an impulse to archive. They then directed their research toward architectural ensembles marked by obsolescence, where abandonment implicitly sketches a portrait of our societies.

In 2005, their quest took them to Detroit, a city that was once known as the ‘Motor City’ but now a real American Pompeii. Their investigation eventually led them to Japan in Gunkanjima (2008 —2012) and to their long-term project Theaters (2005 — 2021). Their practice, influenced as much by the Bechers’ serial rigour as by urban exploration and an attention to pictorial academicism, found recognition with The Ruins of Detroit (Steidl, 2010), which became an experimental work that uses generative AI to transform the city of Paris itself into a post-apocalyptic ruin.

For a long time, photography carried a promise of indexicality — what appears in the image existed before the lens, bound by a tacit pact with reality. The rise of generative AI and its imitative power shook this already fragile principle. From this sense of vertigo, Les Ruines de Paris was born: an illusory game between imagining a city's future ruins and resisting the obsolescence that seems already foretold. And in this exhibition, they premiere a new body of work that applies the same method used for Paris to transform the cityscape of Kyoto into a desolate ruin through generative AI. By mixing archives and personal photos, the duo enacts a ‘crumbling’ of the city, extending a reflection on the representation of ruins and questioning our fascination with collapse.