Pigmento

Pigmento is a photographic project developed within the collaboration between CEPV and the ALICE laboratory at EPFL. The work investigates how a territory marked by catastrophe gradually reconstructs itself through the traces visible on its architecture, colours, and everyday uses.

The project takes place on the island of Saint-Martin, deeply transformed by Hurricane Irma in 2017. Rather than documenting reconstruction as a purely technical process, Pigmento observes what remains visible in the landscape: weathered walls, unfinished structures, reused materials, faded paint, and newly applied colours. Buildings become witnesses to a continuous dialogue between destruction and renewal.

Inspired by earlier research conducted at EPFL on how individuals leave marks on their environment, this project expands the scale of observation from a campus to an entire territory. It explores how a community collectively reshapes a place after a violent rupture, leaving behind layers of memory embedded within surfaces and structures.

Colour occupies a central role throughout the work. It appears as both a residue of the past and a sign of resilience. In this sense, the title Pigmento refers to colour as a visual trace: an imprint of human presence capable of revealing stories of loss, adaptation, and reconstruction.

Photographs were produced using a strict and repetitive protocol. Most images were made from a moving vehicle with a 50 mm lens, maintaining a constant distance from the landscape and allowing fragments of the territory to emerge. Minimal post-processing, natural light, and attention to texture, surface, and chromatic variation preserve the material reality of the places photographed.

Through this approach, Pigmento constructs a sensitive archive of Saint-Martin, where architecture, colour, and time become visual witnesses to the island's ongoing transformation.