Concrete Doesn’t Burn
Bertrand Cavalier
'Concrete Doesn’t Burn' (2018) evokes the relation between architecture and people. Cavalier photographed the series in 11 European cities which had been damaged by different sorts of armed conflicts. To name few, Cologne, Sarajevo, Belfast, Rotterdam or Le Havre all presented different types of architecture made in reaction to recent history. From Cologne’s brutalist buildings to Auguste Perret’s entire reconstruction of Le Havre’s city center, he observed how symbolic architectures defined or influenced the thinking of urban space.
Bertrand Cavalier (b.1989, France) is an artist living and working in Brussels, Belgium. His work investigates how political upheaval becomes visible in the urban landscape and how this affects the lives of the people who live in it.
Cavalier has had exhibitions at the FOMU in Antwerp, BredaPhoto and La Jeune Création among others. His work was selected for Plat(t)form 2019 by the Museum of Photography in Winterthur and awarded with the Cosmos Pdf Award 2018 at Les Rencontres d’Arles. More recently, Bertrand Cavalier was the recipient of the Sébastien Van Der Straten Grant for his ongoing project The Grid System.
In 2020, his series Concrete Doesn’t Burn will be published with Fw:Books.