What is this dream that takes place in broad daylight, stalks you all over the streets, and crashes into the shields? "How was your dream?" is not what you think. Behind the question dressed in poetry spreads on Hong Kong social networks another reality, that of a struggle for democracy. It's up to you to understand its true translation: "How was your demonstration? This conversational code between activists is used to avoid being incriminated, and its use testifies to the weight of the surveillance that weighs on the activists.
After the labor law, after the railway strike, after the "Black Blocks", after the trials of Tarnac, Balkany, and Benalla, after the meetings of the extreme right, after. Between August and October 2019, Thaddé Comar crossed the "umbrella revolution" in Hong Kong to open a new chapter of documentary photography around social movements. Since 1997 and the handover of the independent republic of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China, the Beijing regime has crushed democratic political life. The insurrection is massive when in 2019, the Chinese regime submits the bill to arrest, extradite and try in China all persons directly or indirectly linked to an activity deemed criminal by Beijing, targeting, among others, journalists, NGOs, social workers, and businessmen and women living or visiting Hong Kong.
At the center of the confrontation, between the armed forces of technologies and the civilians in occupation in the city, Thaddé Comar gives his vision of the uprising. Through the masks and umbrellas of the demonstrators that hide their faces, or the saws that cut the posts equipped with facial recognition devices. Everyone uses light as a weapon to blur the visibility of a surveillance camera or to dazzle the photographers' lenses and prevent the media from taking pictures. Lasers, flashes, and drones lend a science-fiction character to the street scenes. The wardrobe of armors, the chromatic effects, the disproportionate architectures, all these elements from the repertoire of a quasi-cinematographic rebellion where the characters confront each other in a world of disorder. Between the hope of democracy and a totalitarian nightmare, Thaddé Comar's lucid dream is a quest for consciousness; can we simply dream, or is it difficult to act?
