Tangente.

Tangente. By Laurent Chardon. Text by Isabelle Tessier. Les Editions Poursuite, 2010. 40 pp., illustrated throughout, 13,5x18,5cm. Edition of 800.

Book description:

"In January 2002, eager to break away from the daily humdrum, Laurent Chardon decided to go out on a limb, bound from Moscow to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, final stop on the Trans-Mongolia Railway.(... )

Exploring his chosen city provides a standpoint that is, as it were, rudderless, a 'situationist' process of moving about the city along the lines of 'a technique of passing rapidly through different atmospheres' (cf. Guy Debord in Bulletin number 2 of L’International situationniste, December 1958).

This approach means ignoring the usual reasons for taking a journey, doing away with notions of travelling, strolling around, or just wandering about aimlessly.

The aim is to draw up a 'psycho-geography' of a city by studying people’s emotional behaviour in the context of their geographical milieu.

What face does the cityscape present? How do its inhabitants experience it? What are the undercurrents, the meeting-points, the breaking-points? (...)"