Ciel Tombé

In his book Lime Works, Hatakeyama wrote, "mines and cities are like the negative and positive of a single photograph." Ciel Tombé features Hatakeyama's haunting 2007 images of an underground quarry located 17 meters below the Bois de Vincennes, in Paris. Reminiscent of Nadar's 19th-century images of subterranean Paris, the "fallen sky" in these images refers to the collapsed ceilings of the quarry, visible as ruins beneath the forest above. Germain's book was written especially in response to Hatakeyama's images. From Naoya Hatakeyama: "Newton's apple stopped as it fell on the ground but this is not the end point of gravity. The earth's surface is merely a hand held out in the middle of a fall and gravity penetrates this, leading further down towards the center of the earth. It is said that in the ancient times, there were people who worried that the sky they looked up to would fall some day. Though it is difficult for us living in an age of science to imagine the view of 'the sky falling down,' if we consider this as meaning that 'the sky' is a place above us resisting gravity, we can imagine the anxiety of ancient people. The blue sky above was probably not an 'empty sky' but a 'place' for them. And the sky fell down. It penetrated vertically through cities, architecture and our bodies, falling underground. The sky has now become an ancient layer of earth permeating below the city [in which] we live."