Tied up in Red (2015)
During COP21, the HSBC branch at Gare de l’Est in Paris was provocatively transformed into a giant gift-wrapped box, encircled by a painted red ribbon and bow. This street art intervention cast a sharp, visual indictment of global finance’s role in the climate crisis.
HSBC—one of the world’s major funders of fossil fuel extraction—was here symbolically ‘packaged’ as a present, perhaps for oil executives or corrupt governments, underscoring how climate negotiations are often stage-managed performances that gift-wrap destruction as progress.
The image of a bank as a wrapped gift, during a summit meant to tackle planetary emergency, exposed the contradictions at the heart of climate diplomacy—where profit continues to be prioritised over people, and systemic change is cosmetically replaced with symbolic gestures.
Expo Caverna (2020)
The Tablecloth (2024)
Jean-Marc’s tablecloth is a remnant of the man who left London for Paris — who gave up a hard-won career in journalism to photograph graffiti, thinking it would be a short detour. He should have gone home after two years, back to Golborne Road. Instead, he slipped through the cracks of La Goutte d’Or and Belleville, staying six years and eleven months.
When he finally returned to London, he was poor, broken — a hollowed-out version of who he’d been. The years in Paris had stripped him of his newspaper habits, exposed his lack of education, and pushed him deep into illiteracy and instability. But they also brought him into the warmth of Jean-Marc, who offered not just kindness but a place in the roughness — a way to turn collapse into witness.
That tablecloth marks the end of one life and the beginning of another: the journalist gone, but the photographer emerging — an exhibiting artist, shaped by suffering, and respected across class lines not for polish, but for truth.
Natureza, Architectura, Sociedade (2015)
