le soleil la mer

The angel is a messenger from the past, an empathetic figure who struggles and suffers from all the evils of the world, a guardian of memory who watches over to prevent denial. The wing as a metonymic element to evoke the angel, that strange, almost human creature that we can no longer think of without Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee or without the figure of “Rafanielo” from Erri de Luca's novel “Montedidio.”
Our angel is a vagabond, homeless, melancholic and inconsolable but benevolent.
He appears as an intercessor between different generations in my current project “le soleil la mer”, a poetry film in which I combine dreamlike images of the Normandy coastline with images of caregivers and Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes in France and South Tyrol.

In Europe with its stagnant demographics, aging is the lot of the majority. Life expectancy is increasing, and with it the frequency of degenerative diseases linked to aging. Aging means being closer to death, a prospect to which many of us react with denial or repression. The question of care, whether in an institution or within the family unit, is also a source of anxiety for families and aging individuals. Faced with this unease, reflection on dementia, gerontology, and end-of-life care is intensifying, and new models for thinking about aging are emerging.

After being confronted with loss of autonomy and dementia within my own family, I felt a strong need to incorporate these themes into my artistic practice. This led to a project to film in facilities specializing in the care of people with reduced autonomy. I then discovered the nursing homes in Abondant, in the Eure-et-Loir department, and Mühlbach, in the Italian province of South Tyrol.

Abondant, 30 miles from Paris, a village with a cheerful and promising name, has been home to a nursing home for over 70 years, distinguished by its humanistic approach, innovative care methods, and original vision. A similar approach is being tried out in Mühlbach, in the province of Bolzano.

The voice, which was initially supposed to play a minor role, becomes the central theme of the video. In an interview, the “caregivers,” children or spouses of residents, have the opportunity to talk about their experiences and difficulties.

I also ask them to describe how they manage to connect and stay in touch with their loved ones today: reading, singing, caressing, caring, walking, looking and smiling, talking... The interviews will be reworked and edited in consultation with the interviewees and, in post-production, will accompany the film as voiceovers, narrated by an actor or actress. The dreamlike sequences, featuring metonymic links, ropes, seaweed, and threads, alternate with sequences filmed in nursing homes.
There is also a supplementary question, asked of the resident and their companion, about the sea, a symbol of time, and of which their memory may retain traces. “Do you like the sea? Would you like to go to the sea? Shall we sing the famous song “le soleil la mer” together?”