A time to live


Dans ma maison 
qui n’est pas ma maison 
tu viendras


If i could make the world as pure
and strange as what i see

fashion / comissioned work

video & film

cv

contact

A TIME TO LIVE

EXHIBITION AT THE VILLA NOAILLES, 2025             



 “我們是不是只能知道一半的事情啊”

 “Can we only ever know half of things?” asks Yang-Yang in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi. Photographing people from behind so they can see what they never perceive themselves, he inspires Basile Pelletier’s exploration of fragile half-truths.
The title of the series, taken from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die, keeps only the first half an intentional cut pointing to inherent incompleteness. As a French photographer in Taiwan, Basile looks from a position of estrangement; unable to claim full understanding, he uses this distance to open a space built from fragments.
Created during a six-month stay in Taiwan for a thesis on New Taiwanese Cinema, the series reflects this immersion. Without actors yet not without staging, friends and encounters embody the tension between lived intimacy and constructed scenes. Documentary moments stand beside staged ones as parts of the same drifting narrative.
By playfully borrowing and subverting fashion imagery, A Time to Live interrogates what it means to see and represent. Rather than telling a complete story, it captures a threshold, a youth suspended between childhood and adulthood.