What is built cultural heritage? What is worth preserving? What is beauty and what is historical value?

Photographer François Vermot spent a year traveling through the Bernese Jura to document its architectural heritage.

Patrimoine Grand Chasseral (Swiss Heritage Society) wanted to entrust this project to an artist from another region and give him complete freedom in its realization. The route is like a treasure hunt that explores the architectural diversity of the region: Belle Époque buildings, watchmaking town planning, bourgeois houses, workers' housing, repurposed factories, cinemas, schools or churches. In the background, the landscapes of the Jura and the spatial planning, sometimes harmonious, sometimes in stark contrast to the cultural heritage.

What is built cultural heritage? What is worth preserving? What is beauty and what is historical value?

The photographs convey the human presence and daily life around these spaces. Even if the images refuse to affirm architectural norms, they help to sensitize the eye to coherence or its opposite, as well as to a certain visual poetry that is often hidden in places that are banalized by habit. Every place has its meaning, whether it is beautiful, imperfect, well-designed, strange or banal. In this way, the image lends the walls a certain grace and depth.