Nathalie Rey

When I was 20, I went to study on an American campus near Chicago. During the first few weeks, I experienced a sharp feeling of strangeness which reason I could not understand. And then all of a sudden I saw what I had in front of my eyes from the start or, to be more exact, what had disappeared from my visual and sound field since my arrival; on this campus of 50000 students, there were no children.

This memory came back to me during the confinement; on the occasion of my rare outings, I experienced a disconcerting lack from the absence of children in the city (much more striking to me than the absence of traffic for example) which I interpreted as the sign of a deeply abnormal situation, comparable to the sudden stop of the heckling of nature in front of danger.

Towards the end of the confinement and to this day, I sporadically go back to work in my studio in Hospitalet. On the way between the metro and the studio there is a nursery school, the one in the photo, empty since March 13. Looks like a wasteland.

In the wake of the legend of the Pied Piper by Hamelin, the work “Le Solitaire” is a tale about the human condition, about the invisible emotional links that weave between the members of a society, about the fragility of cities as a model of conviviality, on the artifice of urban agitation, on loneliness.

"The Loner" can be each of us condemned to a new kind of isolation in the once again bustling city. It is also a game which consists in removing all the marbles from the checkerboard until the last one.

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Barcelona, May 7 2020