Remi Lucidi, a sergeant within the French Military, died removed from a battlefield. His physique was discovered final week apart a Hong Kong skyscraper the place he had been noticed close to the rooftop.
In his spare time, Mr. Lucidi, 30, was a “rooftopper,” shorthand for somebody who takes images and selfies from the tops of tall buildings, generally by trespassing. After his dying was reported, some Instagram customers debated the worth and goal of his artwork, which concerned clambering onto ledges and antennae in cities throughout Europe, Asia and the Center East.
To pals and admirers, Mr. Lucidi’s spine-tingling images had been the work of a proficient, stressed adventurer. To his critics, they had been a case research in reckless risk-taking.
That debate mirrors tensions inside a broader motion referred to as “city exploration,” or “urbex,” one that’s usually related to individuals who trespass to be able to inform the tales of deserted properties. Rooftopping is a part of urbex, however lots of its practitioners are extra thinking about producing social media content material than in exploring marginal city landscapes with a quasi-academic spirit.
In an excessive instance, the Russian mannequin Viki Odintcova dangled from a Dubai skyscraper with out security tools. Her stunt generated greater than 1.6 million views after she posted it on Instagram in 2017, and loads of criticism.
“To Mannequin Viki Odintcova: That Photograph Was Actually Not Value Risking Your Life,” learn the headline of a Forbes commentary. (She didn’t reply to a request for remark.) A number of others world wide have died whereas rooftopping in recent times.
Criticism generally comes from inside the urban-exploration motion. A outstanding rooftooper, the Toronto-based photographer Neil Ta, stop the observe a few decade in the past, saying that he had been disillusioned to see the pastime flip right into a contest over who might take essentially the most harmful photos. Different critics are urbex veterans who object to the rooftopping ethos.
“Rooftopping is concentrated extra on the fun and the expertise of being in excessive, vertiginous and dangerous places, whereas urbex explores deserted locations in a method that’s safer, extra documentational and historic in nature,” HK Urbex, a collective of masked explorers in Hong Kong, stated in a press release.
HK Urbex, whose members enterprise into deserted or harmful websites throughout the Chinese language territory as a method of exploring its historical past, stated that rooftoppers have died world wide from a mix of inexperience, overconfidence and the need to take thrilling photos.
“A life isn’t price a like on social media,” the collective stated.
Theo Kindynis, a sociologist who has studied rooftopping, stated that to many city explorers, younger rooftoppers who have interaction in made-for-Instagram antics are referred to as “dangle kiddies.”
“Remi’s Instagram is stuffed with the identical tropes — legs dangling in entrance of a cityscape, selfie stick on high of a mast, silhouetted determine on a ledge — that had been already changing into cliché in 2016,” stated Mr. Kindynis, a professor at Goldsmiths, College of London, referring to Mr. Lucidi.
Some rooftoppers push again towards that characterization. One is Baptiste Hermant, 23, a Frenchman who has posted “dangling” images however described himself in an interview as an explorer, not a rooftopper.
Mr. Hermant stated most of his city exploration occurs off digicam, and that he does it primarily for the pleasure of consuming beer along with his pals on rooftops, after nighttime climbs, whereas watching the dawn.
“To be on a roof is simply my factor,” Mr. Hermant stated, including that he sees city exploration as a pure outgrowth of a childhood spent scaling rocks and timber.
As for Mr. Lucidi, his pals described him in interviews as an skilled climber who had a selected curiosity in Hong Kong’s dramatic skyline. An announcement posted to certainly one of his Instagram pages this week referred to as him an “extraordinary photographer who captured the great thing about the world from breathtaking heights.”
Considered one of his pals, the Bulgarian rooftopper Yordan Boev, stated on Instagram that he deliberate to “conquer concern on a regular basis” as a method of honoring his good friend’s legacy.
“Metal towers are very very similar to friendships,” he wrote in one other submit that confirmed the 2 males taking a selfie collectively in Bulgaria, with Mr. Lucidi holding the digicam. “We construct them sturdy and tall.”
Julien Kolly, a gallerist in Zurich who represents a French graffiti artist identified for city exploration, stated that Mr. Lucidi reminded him of Alain Robert, a French stuntman who has scaled buildings world wide for many years. He added that Mr. Lucidi’s social media posts had been merely a product of his period.
“Throughout his time, Alain Robert might solely depend on the press to cowl his ascents, whereas these days, Remi Enigma takes cost of staging and photographing his personal exploits to feed his Instagram account,” Mr. Kolly stated, referring to Mr. Lucidi’s Instagram nom de plume.
Mr. Lucidi’s dying was confirmed by phone on Thursday by the French navy and reported earlier by The South China Morning Put up and different information shops. He was on trip in Hong Kong when he died, stated a French navy spokesperson who declined to be named, citing protocol.
The Hong Kong authorities haven’t confirmed the precise circumstances of the dying, saying solely that the law enforcement officials discovered Mr. Lucidi’s physique after responding to a name from a safety guard.
Mr. Lucidi’s Instagram web page contains 143 posts from excursions world wide — London, Bangkok, Dubai, Mexico Metropolis and so forth. In a single submit, he defined that he traveled broadly “to get extra adrenaline to discover a higher strategy to get pleasure from life.”
Lots of his posts had been accompanied by hashtags like #urbanrogues and #scaryhighstuffs, and playful captions that made mild of the dangers he took to get his pictures.
“Enjoyable on the Edge,” he wrote of mendacity on a roof ledge in Warsaw two years in the past.
Mr. Lucidi had made a number of journeys to Hong Kong. His final goal there was the Tregunter Towers, a three-building luxurious residence that sits on a quiet, winding highway close to the mountainous backbone of town’s important island — excessive above the trams, buses, workplace buildings and pedestrians under. The South China Morning Put up reported {that a} witness had seen him knocking on the window of a 68th-floor penthouse.
On Friday morning, safety guards on the advanced had been standing behind a black gate shrouded by subtropical foliage with purple flowers. Home employees guided pedigree canine and child strollers up and down slender, twisting sidewalks.
A number of runners had been heading additional uphill, towards a mountain climbing path that climbs via a forest to a mountain peak with panoramic views. Some paused to look again on the identical skyline that Mr. Lucidi had captured in his final submit.
