The task of defining happiness has long been delegated to religions, philosophies or even politics. Today this universal quest seems more and more to be the province of the pharmaceutical industry, which uses all of the tools of the modern age (science, marketing and communication) to offer everyone a standardized and automatic response to this ultimate human aspiration. More than ever, to be happy is a duty. 

Running through our collective unconscious and pop culture, from Alice in Wonderland to The Matrix, is the leitmotif of the pill: an almost magical solution to difficulties, depression, and all the inadmissible limitations of our human condition. The promise of transformation and healing through chemistry offers the most perfect metaphor for a Promethean society that believes only in efficiency, power, youth and performance. A society where the appearance of happiness is better than happiness,

For five years, journalist Arnaud Robert and photographer Paolo Woods travelled the world in search of Happy Pills, those drugs that can repair an invisible wound, those substances that can make people take action, help them to work and to get it up, those formulations that allow the depressed to avoid total collapse, the painkillers that the working poor gobble down so that they can keep on feeding their families. Everywhere, from Niger to the United States, from Switzerland to India, from Israel to the Peruvian Amazon, pills offer immediate solutions where once there were only eternal problems.

The project exists in three different forms: a book, an exhibition and a film.