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 loss of life 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 examine in reckless risk-taking.
That debate mirrors tensions inside a broader motion known as “city exploration,” or “urbex,” one that’s typically related to individuals who trespass with a view to inform the tales of deserted properties. Rooftopping is a part of urbex, however a lot of its practitioners are extra concerned with 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 gear. 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 Picture Was Actually Not Price Risking Your Life,” learn the headline of a Forbes commentary. (She didn’t reply to a request for remark.) A number of others around the globe have died whereas rooftopping in recent times.
Criticism generally comes from inside the urban-exploration motion. A distinguished rooftooper, the Toronto-based photographer Neil Ta, stop the follow a few decade in the past, saying that he had been disillusioned to see the pastime flip right into a contest over who may take probably the most harmful footage. 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 threatening areas, whereas urbex explores deserted locations in a means that’s safer, extra documentational and historic in nature,” HK Urbex, a collective of masked explorers in Hong Kong, stated in an announcement.
HK Urbex, whose members enterprise into deserted or harmful websites throughout the Chinese language territory as a means of exploring its historical past, stated that rooftoppers have died around the globe from a mixture of inexperience, overconfidence and the will to take thrilling footage.
“A life shouldn’t be value 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 interact in made-for-Instagram antics are often called “dangle kiddies.”
“Remi’s Instagram is filled with the identical tropes — legs dangling in entrance of a cityscape, selfie stick on prime 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 digital camera, and that he does it primarily for the pleasure of ingesting beer together 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 bushes.
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. A assertion posted to one among his Instagram pages this week known as him an “extraordinary photographer who captured the fantastic 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 means of honoring his buddy’s legacy.
“Metal towers are very very like friendships,” he wrote in one other submit that confirmed the 2 males taking a selfie collectively in Bulgaria, with Mr. Lucidi holding the digital camera. “We construct them robust and tall.”
Julien Kolly, a gallerist in Zurich who represents a French graffiti artist recognized for city exploration, stated that Mr. Lucidi reminded him of Alain Robert, a French stuntman who has scaled buildings around the globe 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 may 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 loss of life 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 loss of life, saying solely that the cops 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 around the globe — 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 method to take pleasure in life.”
A lot 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 photographs.
“Stress-free 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 street close to the mountainous backbone of the town’s primary 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 complicated had been standing behind a black gate shrouded by subtropical foliage with purple flowers. Home staff guided pedigree canine and child strollers up and down slender, twisting sidewalks.
A couple of runners had been heading additional uphill, towards a mountaineering path that climbs via a forest to a mountain peak with panoramic views. Some paused to look again on the similar skyline that Mr. Lucidi had captured in his final submit.
