During the first lockdown, my son was building cabins in the middle of the living room, stretching blankets between armchairs, the table and the sofa. I watched him and saw myself doing the same thing at his age, like most children. This is an emancipatory act: creating one’s own world outside the adult world. I was drawn to this idea of positioning oneself outside the world.

Who else uses a cabin? People engaged in solitary activities, such as shepherds or fishermen, gardeners, certain artists, poets; people who wish to live differently, or who cannot afford conventional housing. I thought of people without homes, of migrant camps, of the 150 shanty towns in France. I also thought of ZAD activists fighting to protect threatened natural areas, and of the gilets jaunes who built cabins on roundabouts. By choice or by necessity, to protest or to resist, always to find shelter, those who build, use and share cabins position themselves on the margins of the global world.

I wanted to use this stance, this image of the cabin, to question our relationship with the world, to evoke the fragile balance that shelters us. Because that is also what a cabin is: a fragile construction, made from materials found on site, using only what is essential, with only a thin boundary between outside and inside, between private and public, between the intimate and the universal.

Benoît Mousserion