In their previous joint work (STATE, publ. by Photosynthèses, 2013, premiered at Musée de l’Elysée, 2013), Arnaud Robert and Paolo Woods developed an approach in which text and images come together to form a compound narrative, the idea being that the images do not illustrate the text and the text does not explain the images. From this point of view, HAPPY PILLS is not, strictly speaking, a series of photographs, but a collection of stories that try to make sense of our chemical cravings.

It is built around a corpus of original images that range from portraits to an exploration of the characters’ social networks, from series like Home Pharma, where families in more than thirty countries were asked to display all of the medications they keep in their homes, to images captured in research labs and pharmaceutical production facilities. It has been constructed as an encyclopedia of happiness, and the textual portions will allow us to answer, in a more scientific and philosophical manner, the very contemporary quandary : Can happiness be put into in a pill ?