"Survival" is a cinematographic sub-genre that characterizes dystopian adventure films. Most often located in a contemporary context, these stories depict the survival of a central and isolated character struggling for his survival, in a post-apocalyptic setting where humanity as we know it has disappeared.

Playing on the observation of the desertification of town centers and the massive closure of many small businesses, the Survival installation poses the question of a new aesthetic of abandonment. In some towns, trompe l'oeil poster campaigns have been carried out in order to camouflage the state of disrepair. Here, Rémi Groussin returns to the original context of the Crystal Palace window by questioning its formerly commercial and currently artistic role. It is this almost contradictory ambivalence that highlights the status of the images and forms present in this space and suggests the ruin of an elliptical scenario.

It was since his visit to the empty Crystal Palace window that the artist began photographic research and modeling work from various unoccupied commercial interiors, to define certain formalist recurrences. Starting from a spatial vocabulary made up of grids, walls, windows and furniture, Rémi Groussin recomposes the interior of a shop whose scenography oscillates between commercial space and museum staging. The object, the market product, has completely disappeared. All that remains are the remains of spatial elements used for its promotion and commercial highlighting. Images of reduced models printed on a human scale give the illusion of a serial repetition, giving indications on the very nature of this supposed trade. However, each element is precisely different and it is through the details of their similarities and dissimilarities that they depict an almost labyrinthine space, to be traversed not physically but mentally. Enlargements and mise en abysses then constitute the abandoned decor of a past to be redefined by a certain form of disenchantment that the artist here wishes to make sculptural, thus disturbing the viewer's gaze between reality and fiction.

The Crystal Palace window then becomes the setting for a film where only a few clues that remain and resist attempt to tell us the story of their own bankruptcy.