I'm going to tell you the story of my father, Maurice. He went through a war, cancer, and a coma that left him with permanent neurological damage. I like to say that he then moved to a planet that existed only in his mind.

When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, I was 17, and he was 79. I naively believed that having a doctor for a father made him invincible. After a short course of chemotherapy, he was able to undergo surgery to remove the tumor. But due to an allergic reaction causing a pulmonary shock and several cardiac arrests, he fell into a coma for a month and a half, which damaged his brain. He came out of it forever changed.
It was a long road to recovery, both in the hospital and at home. Everything was uncertain. Maurice had become like a newborn again – fragile and dependent. He had to relearn everything: speaking, eating, walking.

He could no longer be left alone. During his recovery, he was stagnant – asleep, absent, disconnected from reality. But over time, and to our great surprise, despite uncertainty and fragility, he slowly came back to life. Maurice began to express himself again, regaining his wit and his memories. He spoke, laughed, sang, mixed Victor Hugo’s poems with La Fontaine’s fables, played with words, and was moved like a child…
His brain remains a mystery, and in the face of this rebirth—so fragile and unexpected—I decided to dedicate a major artistic project to him: the Maurice Project.

At the beginning of his illness, my camera was like a shield between his sickness and me. Later, it became part of his recovery: it caught his gaze and offered a new form of stimulation. It became a means of communication between us—a new language, a game in which my father invited me to join him on his planet.

Through photography, I no longer suffered from my father's illness—I embraced his reality and was able to turn his way of being into poetry.