Chapter 27: France

There’s a common misconception among Americans that good European crime stories only come out of Italy. Anyone who has spent time in France knows that’s not true. Paris has a respectable collection of hustlers, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and murderers who deserve their own mythology. And it doesn’t stop at the capital. A thick criminal underworld exists in most French cities.

“Hey, where do you come from?”
“I’m from Sartrouvillois, baby!”

West suburbs representative, and been that since I was a kid. In 34 years, I’ve had time to observe my hood, its codes and its changes. My fascination for the world that surrounds me has turned into a passion. Today I use it in my everyday work. My city is the engine of my plastic reflection. While most of my friends were playing soccer or riding mopeds, I was drawing. Already an alien at that time. Today, I try to decipher a discredited world through simple and ironic little mechanisms which I transpose into galleries, just to rub the outcome, the language of popular culture, into the white cube.

Thuggish, nerdish, indie, club, die hard, or those who keep it fake… La Caution is one of the only groups that all French Hip Hop fans can seem to agree on. However, music is not the topic now.

Although I was born in Paris and raised in one of its northern suburbs, I could also say I was raised through ten years of traveling back and forth between Auberviliers and New York City.