Summer off the grid

LESS requirements
“In my job, optics cannot work without haptics; the underlying is also physical," says Amélie du Chalard, head of the Parisian gallery Amélie, Maison d'art, who retires every summer to a farmhouse in Provence, where she has no network, just a wifi connection from confinement, which she bitterly regrets. "By dint of seeing images only on screen or by e-mail, watching Instagram in the evening and on weekends, etc., I have a feeling of disgust, of visual overflow, as if I was falling apart , she explains. I need a world where the screen doesn't create a screen, precisely, with touch, speech, even if I'm not looking for something talkative in the summer. In Provence, we are quite isolated, I don't see many people: that means we are together, with my husband, my children. I feel better with them, and with myself. I think a lot better.” Freed from the omnipresence of images, the mind is also freed from the gaze of others - the one that compels us to dress well, to play our role and from the gaze of others, whose lives we observe on social networks. Less comparisons, pressure, requirements: we can finally focus on the essentials, the definition of which varies for everyone. “What is important … it can be to read certain books, to nourish your spirituality, to play sports, to take care of your children, develops François Bourgognon, psychiatrist and author of Nuances (First Editions, 2023). In fact, it's everything that brings us psychological oxygen in a world where we give all the time, and where everything pushes us to be absent from ourselves, to the point of sometimes making us lose the feeling of physical presence in the world. world, the feeling of being alive. »