La Solitude
des Automates
The Solitude of Automata
Looped video, stereo sound · 6’39’’ · 2025
PhotoSaintGermain 2025
La solitude des automates was filmed on site in 2024 at Fuzhou Changle Jinyuan Textile Co., Ltd., Fujian, China, from an electric cart moving through an AI-controlled textile production line. Rather than reproducing familiar imagery of industrial misery, the film turns toward the density, precision and estrangement of the factory itself.
Presented as a single unedited sequence, the work preserves the continuous drift of mechanical labour. An original soundtrack composed by the artist moves with the machinery, while a brief string motif marks each appearance of a worker — a fragile human presence surfacing within the automated field.
From this almost dreamlike realism emerges a layered solitude: that of labour, industrial practice, the machine and automation itself. The work reflects on a contemporary condition in which global production is shaped not only by intelligence and efficiency, but also by distance, misreading and the quiet isolation of those — human or nonhuman — who remain inside the system.
Developed alongside the moving-image work La Solitude des Automates, these photographs turn toward the industrial space itself. Made inside an automated textile factory in Changle, China, the series shifts attention from production toward architecture, artificial light, repetition and absence. Rather than presenting automation as a dystopian spectacle, the photographs observe how it reorganises space, perception and human presence.
