Le Grand Incendie
Publisher : Éditions Textuel
Release Date : 06/2015
ISBN : 978-2-84597-520-0
Book Size : 20 x 30 cm
Language : Français / French
72 pages
In France, between 2011 and 2013, every fifteen days, one person immolated himself by fire on public square, on the company’s parking, in the court of high school, in front of the tax office…
Samuel Bollendorff photographed eleven of these places, in France and abroad, at the corner of the sidewalk or the peri-urban area.
“How to report? There is no need to show the violence of an immolation to be sensitive to such an event, to receive the shock wave. On the contrary. The calm and the emptiness of these places feeds everyone’s imagination. The orchestration of denial figures the horror”, affirms Samuel Bollendorff.
The book restitutes also the edifying and terrifying words of these men and women or their relatives collected by Samuel Bollendorff. Immolation is not a scream like any other. It is an extreme act of political protest. In France, it tells the almost- disappearance of the collective struggle, the end of the solidarity and the disintegration of public service. We know about immolation in Vietnam, Prague, Tibet, India or more recently in Tunisia for the revolutionary impact. When these acts happen abroad, it is indeed the protest that stakes whereas in France a discourse on the psychological fragility of those who committed these acts obscures their message.
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