ETIENNE PERRONE - Photographe
THE MONSTER IN THE HOUSE
Multimedia installation - Project proposal for TOKAS International Creator Residency 2027
Installation visualisation — provisional spatial mock-up
The Monster in the House explores how people continue to live when they already know that danger is real.
The “monster” is not a creature. It is the presence of what cannot be fully controlled: earthquake, fire, flood, war memory, technological risk, ecological collapse, illness, and the fragile systems built to contain them. The “house” is the place where life continues anyway: the city, the body, the home, the daily routine.
The project does not represent catastrophe directly. It focuses on the strange normality built around it: hazard maps, warning signs, evacuation routes, memorials, flood-control systems, archives, rebuilt neighborhoods, domestic spaces, and ordinary gestures.
What Happens — ongoing series
Tokyo is a crucial field for this research because the city contains, with exceptional density, the tensions at the center of the project: disaster memory, preparedness culture, rivers, lowlands, warning systems, reconstruction, and everyday life. In eastern Tokyo, especially around Sumida, Koto and surrounding low-lying areas, risk is not abstract. It is mapped, measured, rehearsed and built into the urban fabric.
The installation would combine still photography, moving image, sound, altered images, maps, archival traces and simple warning objects. A dark room would contain photographic prints, slow video projections, a table with maps and research documents, a digital seismograph-like signal, discreet sound, and subtle lights.
The viewer would move through a space that feels less like a disaster scene than a quiet room where danger is being monitored.
Moving image tests — transforming images
Scientific and administrative images are central to the project: flood maps, seismic diagrams, satellite images, fire maps, night-light data and deformation maps. These images are not used as decoration. They show how invisible threat becomes visible through data, color, boundaries and measurement. They transform fear into information, but they do not make it harmless.
The project extends my previous research into nocturnal urban spaces, absence, artificial light and latent narrative. It also develops my recent experiments with rephotography, water, particles and optical distortion. In this process, a photograph is rephotographed through unstable matter until the image appears affected by pressure, memory or disturbance.
The Monster in the House asks a simple question:
How do we inhabit a world where the danger is already known, already mapped, already inside the house?
Installation visualisation — provisional spatial mock-up
The installation is imagined as a dark, quiet and immersive room, closer to a space of observation than to a theatrical disaster scene.
The viewer would move through a field of fragments: photographic prints, slow video projections, altered images, maps, archival documents, discreet sound, warning objects and technological signals.
A central table could gather hazard maps, flood zones, fire maps, seismic diagrams and research documents, laid out like traces of an investigation.
Around it, photographs and videos would show ordinary places, water surfaces, interiors, infrastructures and thresholds, some of them transformed through rephotography, particles, reflection and light.
A small warning lamp, a speaker, a monitor or a seismograph-like waveform would suggest that something beneath the room is still registering, trembling or transmitting. The installation would not explain the catastrophe.
It would create a space where danger has already been measured, normalized and quietly absorbed into everyday life.
Research references: historical maps, hazard maps, seismic data, satellite imagery and deformation visualisations from public scientific, governmental and archival sources.
Human presence — previous staged portrait studies
Although much of my current photographic work focuses on empty spaces, human presence will be an important part of The Monster in the House.
The portraits produced in Tokyo would not be conventional portraits, but staged or semi-staged domestic situations: people inside homes, near windows, thresholds, tables, maps or screens, with part of the frame deliberately left empty.
This empty space would become the place of the invisible “monster” — not shown directly, but suggested by the tension around the figure.
The images below come from previous staged portrait studies. They are not final images for the project, but they show a direction I intend to develop in Tokyo: human presence, domestic space, artificial light, psychological distance, and the feeling that something unseen occupies the room.
Final intention
The Monster in the House is not a project about fear as an emotion.
It is a project about living inside uncertainty.
It asks how people build meaning, beauty and routine in places where danger is known but never fully controllable.
It asks how images can carry invisible pressure without turning catastrophe into spectacle. It asks what happens when scientific data, domestic life, urban memory and artistic transformation are placed in the same room.
The monster is not coming.
The monster is already here.
And the house is still inhabited.