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Survival: Violence against women, photographed by Denis Paillard

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Twenty years ago, Bosnia-Herzegovina plunged into war. The fall of the Berlin Wall a few years earlier had not protected the reunified Europe from the return of barbarism to its frontiers. Ethnic cleansing disfigured and sullied this meeting ground of peoples, exposed to the evil winds of history and its apprentice wizards.

The indifference of the western leaders, intoxicated by their fresh victory over communism, sealed our impotence to keep our promise of “never again” while the mass graves filled the bowels of a Bosnia long since abandoned to its fate. In 1995, a shaky peace silenced the guns but left a divided country, both in its memory and its institutions.

With the tireless “Mothers for Peace”, Denis Paillard, a photographer from Lille, a careful and patient traveller, focussed his view on this country which is trying to rebuild itself. His lens knows how to grasp, with a sense of propriety, this extraordinary force which springs from the depths of the abyss of trauma and allows those who know how to grasp it, to learn to confront the ordeal and the suffering, and to go forward even If the wound is and will always be present. The war’s stigmata are still there, on the smashed-open facades, on the closed faces and the contorted. yet determined and dignified silhouettes.

Munira, Sehida and Kada have found a response, other than vengeance, to the injustice by becoming guardians of the memory of the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995. Against forgetting, to be able to say, to tell, to put into words, to construct a narrative, to put a name on each of the victims, is to overcome the work of the killers who relied on the eternal silence of the dead. The pain is omnipresent but it is this willingness to face, to live in spite of everything that pierces them in each of these photographs. Despite the incomprehension. Despite the irreparable, A willingness that also illuminates the features of these men and women who dare to denounce the crimes of their own side and fight against hatred. Srebrenica, Prijedor, Kozarac, Bihac, Gorazde, Foca, Sarajevo, so many of the martyred cities where we are taken by Denis Paillard, photographer of survival.

Florence Hartmann

Florence Hartmann is a journalist and author, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia for Le Monde and was spokesperson for Carla Del Ponte at the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Denis Paillard, Survivance
From 7th to 23rd June 2017
Hôpital de Gap
1 Place Auguste Muret
05000 Gap
France

Events associated with the exhibition:

http://regards-alpins.eu/

https://www.utlgap.org/

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