Photography or Photorealism? An Encounter at Galerie VU’…

Vincent Barué introduces the NADKA platform—a veritable repository of heritage memory—and explains the genesis of the exhibition L’épreuve du réel – Chapitre 3.

Interview conducted by Pierre d’Ornano

In 2022, together with Julien Barbier, you founded the NADKA platform, a French enterprise described as operating within "creative heritage preservation." What inspired this initiative, and what are the foundational principles guiding your endeavor?

Our foundational mission has been, and remains, to breathe new life into a largely overlooked creative heritage: projects by architects, designers, and artists that were never built or manufactured. These encompass buildings, furniture, vehicles, objects, and inventions that remained at the stage of blueprints, scale models, or sketches. Soon, we will also feature exceptional garments and jewelry. At NADKA, we transform them into turnkey, unprecedented digital assets for the creative industries: advertising, audiovisual production, cinema, video games, and documentary filmmaking. We hold nearly thirty active licenses enabling us to distribute these assets.

Our approach is anchored in three core convictions. The first is to elevate original, non-standardized human creativity by granting a second life to archival creative material—often ranking among the most innovative and inspiring of its era, yet remaining true dormant treasures. Just because an architect did not win a competition does not mean the design lacks merit; often, quite the contrary.
The second objective is to provide our clients—creative studios across the globe—with exclusive, unprecedented, immediately accessible assets that feature, crucially, pre-cleared reproduction rights. For instance, in the case of Moebius’s Chasseur Déprime vessel, we are the sole holders of the distribution and publishing rights. This is the culmination of extensive negotiations with prestigious institutions such as the Neutra, Wilmotte, and Portzamparc foundations, the Château de Versailles Research Centre, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. Consequently, studios face zero legal risk—an invaluable assurance that sets us apart from content available on the web.
The third pillar is to ensure fair remuneration for the creators and institutions who place their trust in us.

How many projects have you developed, and how vast is your image collection?

 To date, we have roughly 1,000 projects, which represents a collection of 5,000 visual assets. Thirty percent of the catalog is in 3D. It is worth noting that we compile comprehensive dossiers, supported by a platform that indexes each project with meticulous tagging to delineate each creation's influences, styles, and atmospheres. We do not merely sell images.

The agency notably collaborated with the architects at Bechu & Associates to create a virtual world inspired by the oeuvre of Japanese painter, draftsman, and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, designing the Mysterious Temple and the Creative Castle for the AI Hokusai project. Could you share more about this achievement?

It is a virtual exhibition, still accessible online*, set within one of the structures designed by Bechu & Associates. They licensed this monumental, unbuilt building and transposed it into a setting in Japan, thereby decontextualizing it from its intended original site. Therein lies the true beauty of the approach: a timelessness whereby a project is never frozen in time. This structure, which was not originally conceived for such a purpose, found a new calling as a virtual gallery through which visitors can stroll. What excites the architects and designers in our catalog is seeing their concepts reimagined in entirely new environments. The AI Hokusai exhibition has enjoyed resounding success, welcoming several thousand visitors each month.

You were also approached by the Bibliothèque nationale de France regarding the Cenotaph for Turenne…

This was a fifteen-minute video game** we developed and integrated into the BnF website. With this project, we explored an alternative application tailored to diverse audiences, offering an intuitive, browser-based experience where visitors can explore the monument envisioned by Étienne-Louis Boullée within a playful, evocative, and poetic universe. As they navigate the game, visitors cultivate a deeper understanding of the architecture. It is a form of archival "gamification" possessing remarkable efficacy in captivating attention, conveying spatial awareness, and offering insight into the creator's vision.

What was the genesis of the exhibition “L’épreuve du réel – Chapitre 3”?

It arose naturally from our meeting with Xavier Soule and Isabelle Levistre. Xavier Soule is one of France’s preeminent photography collectors, as well as an esteemed entrepreneur. He was also a pioneer in architectural 3D imaging. The projects in our catalog deeply intrigued them. On that occasion, Xavier Soule posed a question at once simple and dizzying: "Can one photograph what has never existed?" Xavier Soule and Isabelle Levistre subsequently dared to exhibit our 'photorealistic images' by confronting them with reality, in a visual dialogue with Paul Nouallet’s photographs of the Grande Arche—a subject of almost abstract materiality. For a gallery, exhibiting intangible architectural works is a remarkably bold move. This marks the third chapter of their L’épreuve du réel cycle, and a major milestone for us. These digital assets are computer-generated renderings of unbuilt architecture, typically intended for cinema or video games. For the purposes of the exhibition, they were approached with the rigorous standards of fine art imagery and elevated to the status of works of art. Collaborating with the gallery’s photographers proved profoundly illuminating. They prompted us to view these buildings—which we believed we knew intimately—from an entirely new perspective. I think in particular of Leonardo da Vinci’s amphitheater, a design I had reconstructed in 3D during the early days of my architectural studies. We virtually explored all these spaces to discover photographic angles; in 3D, the possibilities and compositions are endless, creating a sense of vertigo. The project could quite easily never reach an end.

*Experience the immersive exhibition AI Hokusai by clicking HERE
** Access the game dedicated to the Cenotaph for Turenne on the BnF website by clicking HERE