What is man’s place within the urban paroxysm of mega-cities? How is the human condition defined in the modern urban landscape? Is there any escape from the perpetual retrograde course we are forced to follow between the quest for protecting our individuality and its everyday violation by our very own vital space?
The intensity and impasse echoing in these questions, seem to follow the lonely, almost incorporeal female figure crossing Tadzio’s photographs in the Rémanence series, at a fast and determined pace, anxiously striving to resist the industrial landscape that threatens to devour her.
The bipolar condition, the rupture between individual and environment as well as their interdependence, are not perceived merely at a symbolic level in this work, but are also strengthened through the choices made during the very realisation of the photographs: the total lack of perspective and the face-to-face confrontation of man and buildings, seen in Tadzio’s older works, is now enriched in the Rémanence series by the splitting of the image through the creation of diptychs – the city with and without man – that function for the eyes of the viewer as film stills.