Aumont is in the most sparsely populated region of France. This is the place where these people were born, built their houses, set up a business, started a family and ultimately grow old and die. This is where they have encountered all the people they know. This is their land and their world.

My summers were here. I’m here when the sun shines. I look for shade when I’m too hot and drink water from a spring. I sleep in a room in our family house where no one lives. Who am I to claim this village as mine? What’s left is a remote place where we gather to spend another summer together; it’s the closest we get to being a family. So, I find it a comforting place, where everything seems interlaced and to make sense, as if all things originate here. But that is an illusion. It’s like walking into the middle of a play that is simple, but dramatic, funny and predictable. I have always felt a fascination for this place; for its distinction between how I was and how it is. I still take part in it even though I grew into more of an observer, as this has become distant from my daily life.

Today the elderly are in charge in Aumont and the prevailing atmosphere suggests a generation has been passed over. Many houses stand empty. The young have gradually left in search of a future elsewhere. Now, while the last traces still remain, I want to secure this place before it disappears completely, in an attempt to hold the memory of it and clarify my consciousness. My double nationality has both advantages and drawbacks, but since two are better than one I get to create my own truth from the best of both. But that leaves me in search of silent complicity… 

This project is a portrait of a small community that is disappearing like so many others.