Dark Celebration: Cédric Delsaux's Underground Society at EMOP 2017

Dark Celebration – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (25 Mar – 13 May 2017), record WPG.12 in this catalogue, was the gallery's entry in the 2017 European Month of Photography and, as the program turned out, the penultimate exhibition it mounted on rue Louvigny. It showed Cédric Delsaux's Underground Society (2013–2015): the photographer who had become internationally known for setting Star Wars machinery down in real car parks and construction sites turned the same staging discipline on the corporate present, and pushed it toward apocalypse. The festival listed the show in its program; Luxembourg's daily press reviewed it within the week; the French photography press carried it in April. Nineteen days after it closed, the gallery opened one more exhibition, and then its documented program stopped.

This entry assembles what the public record establishes about the show — the series it drew from, the coverage it received, the festival that framed it — and follows Delsaux's career past the gallery's end, since the artist kept moving after the venue did not.

Exhibition

Dark Celebration – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (25 Mar – 13 May 2017)

Record

WPG.12

Artist

Cédric Delsaux (b. 1974, France)

Series shown

Underground Society (2013–2015)

Context

European Month of Photography Luxembourg (EMOP), 2017 edition

Venue

The gallery then operated at 22, rue Louvigny, Luxembourg City (historical address)

Contemporary press

Le Quotidien, 28 Mar 2017 · 9 Lives Magazine, 20 Apr 2017 · L'Œil de la Photographie

The series: Underground Society, 2013–2015

Underground Society is the darkest body of work Delsaux has produced, and it was made immediately before the Luxembourg show. The festival's own presentation described it plainly: the series "continues his exploration of recurring anxieties of humanity by plunging places and figures in a troubling obscurity." Where Dark Lens borrowed its menace from cinema, Underground Society generates its own. The settings are corporate and institutional — the offices, lobbies, and service spaces of the managed world — and the figures in them appear as survivors of an unnamed catastrophe. The 9 Lives Magazine notice of April 2017 characterized the pictures as visions of "apocalyptic futures" in which catastrophes, tragedies, and collapses succeed one another without respite: the recurring dreads of the present, staged as tableaux rather than reported as events.

Delsaux himself declined to fix the work's meaning too tightly. In the text accompanying the festival listing, he allowed that the series might represent "a feeling, an elusive state of mute astonishment and suffocation, a latent presence about to break out or a distant fear." Le Quotidien, reviewing the Luxembourg hang, drew from him something blunter. "Tout est une histoire de hantises!" — everything is a story of hauntings — he told the paper, describing himself as a former optimist and observing that catastrophe is not a forecast but a condition already inhabited. The exchange is one of the few interviews the exhibition generated, and it fixes the register: not science fiction, not reportage, but anxiety given a photographic architecture.

The full series ran to some forty photographs, according to Le Quotidien's account; the exhibition presented roughly ten of them. That ratio — a quarter of the series, edited for a single room — is worth recording, because the gallery's space on rue Louvigny was small, and its exhibitions were selections, not surveys.

A title that is not the series title

One small curatorial fact separates this show from most of the gallery's program: it did not simply borrow its series' name. Nocturnes showed nocturnes; Muses showed the Muses pictures. Here the series was Underground Society and the exhibition was Dark Celebration — a title that exists only for the Luxembourg presentation, and that does its own interpretive work. A celebration is what the pictures depict, corporate ritual carried on in the dark by figures who may not have noticed the catastrophe; and a celebration is also what an exhibition is. The title folds the audience into the scene it has come to look at, which is consistent with the reading Le Quotidien's reviewer reached independently: a society that consumes images of collapse as entertainment. Whether the title came from the artist or the gallery is not established by the public record. What the record does establish is that both names circulated at once — the festival and the French press used Dark Celebration, L'Œil de la Photographie filed the pictures under Underground Society — so this catalogue carries the exhibition title, with the series named in the entry.

The exhibition on rue Louvigny

The show's dates are almost, but not quite, unanimous in the record. The gallery and the French photography press gave 25 Mar – 13 May 2017; the EMOP program listing gives an opening of 24 March. The discrepancy is trivial — a vernissage evening against a first public day, most likely — but the Record notes it rather than smoothing it over, and follows the gallery's own dating in the catalogue line above.

Le Quotidien's reviewer, visiting in the opening week, found tragic figures in shadowy, dust-laden settings and read the series as a study in society's contradictory relation to violence — celebrated nightly as entertainment, feared when it arrives. That reading belongs to the reviewer, not the gallery, and it is the most substantive critical response the exhibition received in Luxembourg. The 9 Lives Magazine notice of 20 April placed the show for French readers, noting the gallery's address at 22, rue Louvigny and the festival context; L'Œil de la Photographie carried the series under its own title, Underground Society. For a two-room commercial gallery in a small capital, that is a respectable press file — one national daily, two French photography outlets, and a festival program entry.

The exhibition sat inside a precise sequence. It followed Nocturnes – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (9 Feb – 18 Mar 2017), the Alvin Booth show, with a turnaround of one week. It overlapped the gallery's outing to Art Paris at the Grand Palais, stand E17, in late March 2017 — record WPG.13, the fair appearance that included the gallery's homage to Leila Alaoui. And it preceded The Body Behind the Body – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (1 Jun – 22 Jul 2017), the Angelo Musco exhibition that closed the documented program. The full sequence is in the chronology.

The career behind it: Dark Lens

No account of this show makes sense without the series that made Delsaux famous, because Underground Society is its methodical inversion. Dark Lens, begun in 2004, set the vehicles and characters of the Star Wars films down — with complete photographic plausibility — in real locations: first the periphery of Lille and the Paris banlieue, later the towers and construction sites of Dubai. The series won the Bourse du Talent in 2005 and became a book, The Dark Lens (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2011), with a preface by George Lucas — a fact worth stating precisely, since endorsements of this kind are usually rumor. Lucas wrote that "many artists have interpreted Star Wars in ways that extend well beyond anything we saw in the films," and counted Delsaux's among the most singular. The Diesel Art Gallery's biographical note for its Tokyo presentation of the series adds that the book took a Prix du Livre d'Auteur at Arles in 2012.

The point of Dark Lens was never fan homage. Delsaux — who came to photography from advertising, with a film degree and a master's in modern literature behind him — was demonstrating how thoroughly perception of real cities passes through the filter of fiction. Between that series and the Luxembourg show he tested the method against subjects with no cinema in them at all: Nous resterons sur terre (2006–2008), on the human relation to nature; Zone de repli (2011–2014), which spent three years revisiting the haunts of the Romand affair and became a book with Éditions Xavier Barral in 2014. Underground Society completes the trajectory: the fiction is finally removed, and the dread remains.

The festival: EMOP Luxembourg 2017

The European Month of Photography Luxembourg is the biennial festival organized by Café-Crème asbl since 2007, Luxembourg's node in the EMOP network of European capitals. The 2017 edition was built around Looking for the Clouds — Contemporary Photography in Times of Conflict, a joint project mounted across eight cities — Athens, Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Luxembourg, Paris, Vienna — and its Luxembourg program drew in the city's public institutions, Mudam and the MNHA and Casino Luxembourg among them, alongside the commercial galleries. Dark Celebration was Wild Project Gallery's contribution, listed in the festival program with the Underground Society series named; the festival's site still carries the entry (emoplux.lu).

The timing deserves a line in the catalogue. EMOP Luxembourg runs on odd years, in spring; the gallery opened in October 2015, months after that year's edition had closed, and its program ended in July 2017. The 2017 festival was therefore the only EMOP edition to fall inside the gallery's documented exhibition history — one chance to join the city's largest photography event, taken with the darkest work on its roster. A survey of the wider scene the festival anchors is kept in the Journal's Luxembourg field guide; the institutional history of the gallery itself, including what came after July 2017, is at the Record.

Delsaux since 2017

The gallery froze; the artist did not. In 2017 Delsaux's work appeared in Paysages français: Une aventure photographique at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the survey that included France Territoire Liquide, the photographic collective he co-founded. The same year he began Welcome to the Dark Corporation, a series imagining an Earth populated entirely by droids, humanity absent. In 2018 the Star Wars thread returned to Paris as Back to the Stars – Galerie Patrick Gutknecht, Paris (2018) — an exhibition noticed, as the original series always had been, by the Star Wars collector press as readily as the photography press. Since then the practice has widened past photography altogether: his gallery documents bronze sculptures in an Unburied series — a trooper (2020), a protocol droid (2021), a Vader (2023) — alongside text-based work.

One further fact belongs in this archive, because it rhymes with the archive's own subject. The .com address under which Delsaux's work circulated for years is now held by an unrelated operator, and his portfolio lives at a .fr address (observed August 2026). The gallery that showed him in Luxembourg lost its web address too, and its site is gone with it. Web addresses decay faster than careers, and faster than catalogues — which is why the exhibition is recorded here, dated, sourced, and numbered WPG.12.