Till Roeskens, born 1974 in Freiburg (Germany), now lives in Marseille.

A lover of applied geography, Till Roeskens belongs to the family of artist-explorers. His work develops through the encounter with a given territory and those who make their way through it. What he brings back from his explorations, in the form of a book, a video film, a slide lecture, is never a mere reportage, but an invitation to look, a tentative inquiry into what may be understood of the world's infinite complexity. His 'attempts to orient himself' are developed with a constant concern to appeal to a non-specialist public and to make the people he met the co-authors of the work.

Born 1978 in Toulouse, Marie Bouts, a director now based in Lille, is also a scriptwriter, director of photography, and sound engineer. She prefers to describe herself, however, as an “illustrator and gatherer of stories” whose work is “situated on the border between documentary and fiction.”

“Once home to the working class, Paris's north-eastern suburb is being inexorably transformed. The capital is expanding and creating, in an immense open-air workshop, a new chapter of the history of this labouring region. Lost among highways, shopping centres, construction sites, buildings, and waste ground, we asked the people we met here and there to invent with us a cartography of this territory in song. Un Archipel is the story of a disappearing world, an ode to those voices of resistance, a wandering through the city, its landscapes and secret passages.”

“Our primary inspiration was Bruce Chatwin's book, The Songlines, which investigates the sung cartography of Australian Aborigines. We knew how mad and utopian it was to ask the residents of the Parisian banlieue to reinvent something like those Songlines whose mysterious echo comes from the other side of the world.”

“On the other side of the world, we are told, there is a continent where maps are not drawn, but sung. Where the earth is not divided into plots, but run through by invisible lines. Everyone is the recognised guardian of a route, the singer of a path. Lost between the highways, the shopping centres, the high rises, the construction sites, and the waste grounds of the north-eastern suburb of Paris, we asked the people we met, hither and yon, to prove with us the possibility of this continent. We followed their trajectories through cities that seemed endless to us. We listened to their words.”

Translated by Phoebe Green