Château Coquelle in Dunkirk presents until April 5 an exhibition by Thierry Girard entitled: Places of affect [landscapes, people, lives]. He sent us this text.
As a young photographer, I carried out photographic work around Dunkirk between February and June 1982. It was my first artist residency and my first published book, Far-Westhoek; the Westhoek being precisely this western point which forms the border between France, Belgium and the North Sea. In the same way as a few years ago, I returned to question the landscapes and people of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin, 35 years after my numerous stays in the 1980s (see the book published in 2019 published by Light Motiv, Le Monde d’après), I had the desire, more than 40 years later, to rediscover this Dunkirk territory for which I have retained a deep affection.
When we photograph a territory like that of the Dunkirk Urban Community, and more particularly these towns and these areas which extend along the North Sea, from Grand-Fort-Philippe to Bray-Dunes, we can certainly worry about landscapes, what they say about the singularity of this territory, its shape and its thickness; we can be just as worried about the people we meet there, whether they were born here or come from a long Flemish lineage; that they have parents who came from elsewhere for different reasons; that they are themselves from elsewhere, having decided either to stay in this territory for the long term, or to be only passing through, like these migrants met in a refuge, on the threshold of another exile.
And then, we can ask ourselves the question of knowing what links can unite these people to this territory through a few landscapes which tell the intimate story of each one; links which can be deep, old, inherited from childhood, others which are more linked to work or to the actions that each person may have carried out, and sometimes very fleeting links like the last image of a beach before the embarkation towards other horizons.
To do this, I had to listen and record everyone’s story, what he or she wanted to tell me, hoping that over the course of the conversation a desire for a landscape to share, or even recognize together, would emerge. This is how I went shrimp fishing, surrounded up to my waist by the North Sea; listening to the deep and strange sound of the cast iron apron of a lock in the port of Dunkirk vibrate when a vehicle drives over it; wander through the now depopulated streets and squares of the railway workers’ town of Saint-Pol, trying to imagine the groups of children, the cries and the laughter of yesteryear; photographed the ruins of a former leisure center destroyed by fire on Christmas Eve; enjoy the surf of the sea and the wind in the dunes, far from the noise and fury of a war of which only vestiges of concrete or rust remain, but also note in these same dunes the traces of those who are still on their way to others elsewhere…
All these stories put end to end, all these different portraits that are part of the same humanity, all these landscapes which speak at the same time of the beauty and the harshness of this territory, all this together tells in a fair way this very “top of France“ and moves me just as much as the memory I had of it, more than forty years ago. May this feeling be shared.
Thierry Girard
This exhibition follows a creative residency by Thierry Girard at Château Coquelle (February 2023 – May 2024).
Thierry Girard : Les lieux de l’affect [ des paysages, des gens, des vies ]
from January 24 to April 5, 2025
Château Coquelle
Rue de Belfort
59240 Dunkerque, France
https://www.lechateaucoquelle.fr/
site web : http://www.thierrygirard.com
blog : http://wordspics.wordpress.com
newsletter : http://actuthg.wordpress.com
