For four years (from 2018 to 2022) I traveled across Castile-Leon, a vast, sparsely populated agricultural plain, regularly stopping at gas stations. To get there, you have to leave the highway and drive for a few moments on a secondary road. The station appears, most often isolated on a hill, a sort of no man's land where nothing happens except the successive arrivals and departures of cars and their drivers.

 

 

These almost deserted spaces whose boundaries blend into the landscape are what we call non-places, a concept developed by the anthropologist Marc Augé and which designates these purely functional and anonymous platforms like airports, parking lots or supermarkets, where people only pass through and where they cross paths without communicating. One often experiences a feeling of emptiness and absence of meaning.

 

 

We then enter another dimension. Time slows down, space empties. The mind empties, too, into a sort of contemplative stillness. It is this pure state of meditation that I photographed, focusing on moments when there was no one around.

 

An archaeology of the future

Alongside this phenomenological and photographic experience, the series contains an anthropological and almost fictional dimension. It teleports us to a time "after" where pumps, porticos and signs would have become the totems of a vanished civilization, that of our carbon-based world.