Scrapmetal, 2010
Lost in the middle of nowhere, in the Mojave Desert, the American dream comes to an end. Ten kilometers from the first town, at the end of a dirty road, an open-air junkyard is the last place of residence for the past jewels of the American automobile industry, which are already nothing more than heaps of metal. The terrain, several square kilometers in size, is bounded by the cars themselves, crushed and ground. One does not enter this unusual place as one would like. You have to wait for the janitor of the place to push the barrier… This is the only thing his employers ask him to do in exchange for a mobile home and a little money for food. The couple who lives there was homeless before they came to settle in the middle of the desert. For their trips, they use one of the only cars still in working order. Life is punctuated by the ballet of the semi-trailers that come to unload the carcasses of the cars, all American. Some of them was already there in the 1970’s. Coming from the Los Angeles junkyards, the drivers themselves deposit the wrecks on the edge of the lot, thus forming the surrounding wall of the junkyard. These mythical cars, placed one on top of the other, create a fortification, as if waiting for a hypothetical attack. In this Wild West that remains frozen in the desert sand, the American automobile industry, the bearer of the myths of an entire country, seems to have created a veritable cemetery.
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