This project focuses on a particular town and rural area, the former mining basin of Decazeville, in the Aveyron region of southwestern France. On the territory of Decazeville is a mountain called “lou puech que ard”: the mountain that burns. This small mountain, known to some as the “Vesuvius of Aveyron”, bears the image of a territory that is being consumed, but also the strength it continues to deploy, against all odds, in order to live.

With this project, Nina Gazaniol Vérité intends to pursue her research into space-related writing and the connivance between sociological reflection and visual creation. By focusing on the declining countryside, she continues to question, in her own way, notions of norms and strangeness, the visible and the invisible, territories and landscapes.

Constructed like a TV series, the project takes the form of a video installation, at the crossroads of documentary and the visual arts. Viewers/visitors are invited to move around a space that, for a given time, represents the Decazeville area. Between reality and fiction, between zoom interviews and roller field hockey games, between remote-controlled cars and discussions on the apocalypse, between folk dances and empty oyster shells.