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CLUSTERS : The Persistence of What Remains
Written by Ali Khanafer
André Turpin has long shaped the visual language of contemporary cinema through collaborations with Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, and Monia Chokri. His images are known for their atmosphere — for light that seems to hold memory. In CLUSTERS, created with art director Léa Valérie Létourneau, Turpin redirects that cinematic precision toward photography, crafting images where presence is felt most intensely in absence.
Since 2020, the Montréal-based duo has sought out interiors suspended between occupation and disappearance — abandoned buildings, worn domestic rooms, spaces awaiting redevelopment. These environments are not romanticized ruins but fragile thresholds. They carry the residue of daily life: a chair slightly displaced, dust suspended in late afternoon light, walls that have absorbed decades of quiet gestures. In an era of accelerated erasure, CLUSTERS pauses to look carefully.
Lieu de Commerce (CLUSTERS III, 2020)
The process begins with wandering. From discovered sites, the artists imagine the lives that once unfolded there. Scenes are then carefully staged so that they appear uncomposed — as if the camera arrived mid-gesture. Figures seem caught in transitional moments; narratives are implied rather than resolved. The photographs feel intimate and restrained, resisting spectacle in favor of subtle emotional charge.
Each image is built like a short film. Location scouting, casting, costumes, lighting design, and set construction shape the scene before the shutter is released. Technically, every final work is composed of roughly sixty individual exposures captured with a 150-megapixel sensor, allowing extraordinary clarity and depth. The result is paradoxical: hyper-precision in service of impermanence. Every grain of dust becomes evidence.
Létourneau’s background in scenography lends spatial intelligence to the compositions; rooms behave like characters. Turpin’s command of light animates them with tension and quiet drama. Together, they move fluidly between photography and cinema, holding a moment still while allowing narrative to circulate beneath its surface.
Sous-sol à Sainte-Julie (CLUSTERS IV, 2021)
At its core, CLUSTERS reflects on the unstable boundary between what remains and what vanishes. The series resists nostalgia. Instead, it lingers in the delicate interval before transformation — before demolition, renovation, or forgetting. “Haunted by the looming deadline, suspended between scientific rigor and existential vertigo,” the artists describe a practice shaped by urgency.
Printed as archival pigment works on 305 gsm Hahnemühle paper, the photographs assert material permanence against the fragility of their subjects. They do not monumentalize ruins; they insist on memory.
Fin de session (CLUSTERS IX, 2023)
Ultimately, CLUSTERS is less about absence than about persistence. It suggests that spaces retain emotional imprints long after their occupants depart. The human figure may fade, but its trace endures in light, in arrangement, in atmosphere.
In a cultural landscape preoccupied with the new, Turpin and Létourneau offer something quieter and more radical: sustained attention. To look carefully is to acknowledge existence. To frame a disappearing space is to grant it time — if only for a moment longer.
The CLUSTERS series
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