PLENTY & VANISHING in L.A.

PLENTY & VANISHING in Los Angeles

Street digests everything and takes on different appearances over time. The signs have a limited life expectancy. Through their provisions, I try to reconstruct the space of the city.

Cette animation traite de l’abondance des signes dans la ville, et implicitement, de leurs disparitions. La rue digère tout et revêt différentes apparences au cours du temps. Les signes ont une espérance de vie limitée. A travers leurs dispositions, je tente de recomposer l’espace de la ville.

PLENTY & VANISHING in Los Angeles

Plenty Vanishing in Los Angeles continues a research project exploring the abundance of visual signs in cities and their inevitable disappearance over time. Developed after earlier experiments in Paris and Hong Kong, this animation adapts the same conceptual framework to the unique visual identity of Los Angeles. Rather than documenting the city as a fixed landscape, the project examines the continuous transformation of its visual language and the fragile lifespan of the signs that shape everyday urban experience.

Every city is composed of countless visual markers. Street signs, advertisements, graffiti, traffic signals, posters, stickers, handwritten messages, commercial logos and architectural details constantly compete for attention. Together they create an extremely dense visual environment that often becomes invisible through familiarity. The project seeks to isolate these elements in order to make their presence visible again.

Los Angeles provides an especially rich environment for this research. The city is characterized by an extraordinary accumulation of visual information spread across an immense urban territory. Its streets are filled with commercial signage, murals, graffiti, road infrastructure, painted walls, electrical networks and graphic interventions that together form a constantly evolving visual landscape.

Having travelled repeatedly to Los Angeles over several years, I was able to revisit this research with a different perspective. Rather than simply photographing the city, I wanted to deconstruct it into individual visual fragments and reconstruct it through animation. This process transforms documentation into composition, allowing the city to be reimagined frame by frame.

The first part of the animation isolates urban signs inside square frames. Each fragment becomes an independent visual unit separated from its original environment. Once detached from the street, these individual signs begin to function as graphic components rather than documentary images.

Through stop-motion animation, these isolated fragments gradually reorganize themselves to reconstruct an imaginary city. Buildings no longer define urban space. Instead, the city emerges through the accumulation and arrangement of signs themselves. The identity of Los Angeles is therefore expressed through its visual language rather than its skyline.

This method reflects a recurring interest in my work: understanding the city through its traces rather than through monumental architecture. Graffiti, advertisements, road signs and temporary markings all contribute to the identity of urban space, even though most of them remain unnoticed during everyday movement.

The animation also addresses the opposite phenomenon: disappearance. Every sign presented in the film has a limited lifespan. Graffiti is painted over, commercial advertisements are replaced, posters deteriorate, buildings are demolished and road markings fade. The visual identity of the city is therefore never stable but constantly rewritten.

The title Plenty Vanishing reflects this dual movement. On one hand, cities continuously produce new visual information. On the other, these same elements gradually disappear, replaced by new layers. Abundance and disappearance are not contradictory processes but complementary aspects of urban evolution.

This relationship with time has already been explored in earlier projects created in Paris and Hong Kong. In those works, urban signs were also isolated and reorganized through animation to reveal the constantly changing nature of the city. The Los Angeles project extends this research into a different cultural and architectural environment while preserving the same conceptual foundation.

The second part of the animation introduces a significant visual transformation. The colourful compositions give way to monochrome black-and-white images. By removing colour, the work strips away much of the visual seduction associated with commercial and urban graphics.

This reduction encourages viewers to focus on structure, rhythm and quantity rather than colour itself. Without chromatic distraction, the extraordinary density of urban signs becomes more apparent. The city appears as an accumulation of information rather than as a collection of individual objects.

The monochrome sequence also reinforces the idea of memory. Many of the signs shown in the animation have likely already changed or disappeared since they were photographed. Los Angeles, like every major city, continuously replaces its own visual identity. The animation therefore becomes a document preserving fragments that may no longer exist.

This awareness of impermanence connects the work to other projects in my practice, particularly those exploring disappearing graffiti, abandoned industrial environments and urban mutation. Whether through walls, architecture or street signs, the central question remains the same: how does the city continuously erase and rewrite itself?

Stop-motion animation provides an ideal medium for this reflection because it reconstructs movement through the accumulation of still images. The city is literally rebuilt frame by frame before gradually dissolving again into abstraction. The technique mirrors the way urban environments themselves evolve through successive layers of construction, occupation, transformation and disappearance.

Plenty Vanishing in Los Angeles therefore examines not only the abundance of visual signs but also their inevitable disappearance. By isolating, reorganizing and simplifying these fragments, the animation invites viewers to reconsider the visual density surrounding them and to recognize that every sign, no matter how ordinary, exists only temporarily before becoming another fragment of the city’s constantly changing memory.

Music: Tao Haceka