Patience and thoroughness. Equipped with a simple cutter, Nicolas Daubanes hollows out a photo of its white spaces to reveal the contours of a forgotten story. He is working on a monumental image embedded in the wall of the M2M, the contemporary art space in Bourg-en-Bresse. A photo taken at the Thol camp near Neuville-sur-Ain in the Ain department.
These buildings in ruins, were between 1958 and 1961, a house arrest center. Hundreds of Algerians in favor of independence, sympathizers or militants of the FLN (National Liberation Front) lived there in captivity, without any trial. Of this dark page of our history and of the war in Algeria, almost no trace remains today. Only a commemorative plaque at the entrance to the Indian camp was placed by the municipality, at the continuation of the Stora report on colonization and the war in Algeria. No site conservation program exists to date.
From this abandoned memory, the artist wanted to testify. “What I’m trying to do, it is to represent a building which is in decay and which almost disappears”, explains the visual artist, his tool in hand.
This work in the making resonates with another of his installations presented at the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon: I do not recognize your court!. This work depicts the court of the armed forces of Lyon in Montluc, a military court where were judged various supporters of the National Liberation Front during the Algerian war, women and men, conscientious objectors, rebels or even deserters. Some Algerians, members of FLN shock groups, were sentenced to death and guillotined there in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Questioning the prison world or the hasty judgments of History is the meaning of all the work of Nicolas Daubanes. This worker’s son has not forgotten where he comes from. He likes to whet the curiosity of visitors.
I don’t think art in itself is very interesting, but art that suddenly comes to tell something and say “this happened somewhere, we need to understand”, l art as a means of teaching the general public, that really interests me.
Nicolas Daubanesvisual artist
In Bourg-en-Bresse, when the work with the cutter is finished, iron filings will be projected on the photo of the Thol camp. It will become magnetized and fall here and there to dust, like a vestige of history. At the end of the exhibition, the ephemeral work, embedded in the wall, will be destroyed.
Exhibition “Return to see”
from November 19 to February 19, 2023 – H2M, contemporary art space of Bourg en Bresse