The third part of the project was a series of 12 posters with QR codes, which were shown in the park surrounding the Château Coquelle, and on a water tower in the centre of Dunkirk. The exhibitions were put up with the help of the participants.

A pebble, a horse shoe, a little angel found in the trenches during WW1, a family wedding : each image or object has its own story. The stories were set to music and soundscapes composed by Eric Sterenfeld. By scanning the QR code, the audience could hear this story as they contemplated the image. 12 echo chambers.

Participants : Christine, Martine, Sylvie, Viviane, Stan, Lilou, Camille L., Pascal, Fabienne, Clementine, Hugues et Camille L.B.

Music : Eric Sterenfeld / Photos : Kate France

Thanks to the team of the Château Coquelle.

The second episode of the project took place in August 2022, as part of the summer university organised by the association Les Littoraeles at the LAAC (Lieu D’Art et d’Action Contemporain) Dunkirk. The theme for the session was “memories and traces”.

In the morning, there were conferences on amateur archives including a showing of a film of a huge tanker being launched from Dunkirk in the 1950s.

In the afternoons 27 people, each of whom had bought their photo or object, participated in a series of workshops culminating in a recital of texts set to electroacoustic music.

Exhibition and reading in Dunkirk Central Library

We worked with eighty 14 and 15 year old students and three staff members of Guilleminot secondary school, from February to June 2022.

Each student bought in a photograph or an object that was important to them , and showed it to their classmates. Talking about personal issues at school was a very new experience, and there were some emotional moments and surprises.

The project continued with writing workshops, recording and photography over the next few months, in collaboration with the teachers and with three students from Dunkirk Art School.

The exhibition at Dunkirk’s central library, the BiB, showed the texts, photographs, and some of the objects themselves in a display case. Two videos weaved together images from the recorded texts and sound. For the opening, several students read out their texts accompanied by live music .

Visible/Invisible was a socially engaged project led by Ciel 56 in partnership with le Chateau Coquelle, a cultural centre in Dunkirk which specialises in photography and story telling.

The starting point of the project was the personal archive – photo, film or object – and the stories which surround it.

We worked with a large cross section of people and institutions, to create a series of events including a ciné-concert and indoor and outdoor exhibitions in 2022.

As part of our residency in Calais in the middle of the Covid pandemic, we decided to collaborate with the artist Bérengère Vallet on a series of workshops around the theme of transformation and metamorphosis. We worked with primary and secondary schools, including some young unaccompanied exiles, a kindergarten, and two socio-medical centres. Each group approached the idea of transformation with a different artistic process : disguises and masks, portraits that become transformed, traces that disappear…

From September 28th 2020, we will be taking up our residency in Calais, interrupted by the sanitary situation in spring 2020.

For two months, we will be working with the artist Berengère Vallet on a series of different artistic gestures around the theme of metamorphosis.