Tour

Tour – In spring 2020, the Tour de France was cancelled. The route of this edition had nevertheless been revealed by the organization: the sporting competition existed on paper, but there would be no cyclists on the roads. This phantom tour opened a breach: the opportunity to play with the great national narrative to write, in its shadow, another story. For 40 days, Louis Canadas followed these imaginary stages, never straying more than a few meters from the official route. He photographed the France that would not know fulgurance: fields, mountains, workers at rest, road exits, wolves, deserted shops.
For more than a century, the Tour de France has not only offered an image of France to the whole world; it has written its legend, with its great men, its sporting glories and its industrial exploits, its immortal heritage. The competition gives epic accents to innocuous stretches of asphalt and anonymous villages. But what happens when nothing happens? Against the backdrop of sporting heroism, the picturesque and the society of the spectacle, Louis Canadas and the writer Fanny Taillandier recount the banality of these routes, capture the mysterious language of men when they weave relationships with the territory, and examine the myth of competition in order to entice us.