EXPOSITION - Déconnexion

20 years ago, France had almost 300,000 telephone boxes as part of its "universal service". Since 2018, they have disappeared from our landscape. They allowed us to make phone calls in the middle of the street, protected our privacy and charged for every minute of communication. It was another world, a more uncertain and fragile world, where we could still lose a telephone number written on a piece of paper, not know where a call was coming from, wait and not be reached. A missed appointment could be lost forever. There was a relationship with the absolute and with absence that permanent connection has rendered obsolete. There was something more tragic about existence...
What would our lives be like today if the phone box had not been replaced by the mobile phone? Where is our connection to the world? Do we still have control over it?


This series of photos is the fruit of a joint reflection by photographer Stéphanie Lacombe and the theatre company f.o.u.i.c (Clotilde Morgiève & Jean-Christophe Dollé).
Always concerned with social issues, Stéphanie Lacombe also won the BNF 2022 award for Radioscopie de la France, a documentary on the strategies families use to make ends meet in post-industrial France.
Co-produced by Le Carré Scène Nationale et centre d'art de Château-Gontier, the Région Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and the Communauté de communes Bazois-Loire-Morvan, it was made in the Mayenne, Nièvre and Saône-et-Loire regions, with the kind and enthusiastic support of their residents.