Autrement on devient fou
Monograph
96-page monograph exploring themes of displacement and memory through photography, featuring texts in German and French.
96-page monograph with 42 illustrations exploring themes of displacement and memory, featuring conversations and essays in German and French.
monograph, photography, displacement, memory, french
Markus Oberndorfer
Foukauld
Since 2005, the project has examined Nazi Germany’s concrete fortifications along the Atlantic coast around Cap Ferret. It explores their disappearance not only through erosion by sea, sand, and time, but also through human use, conversion, and appropriation. Through photography and longterm approach, the work traces layered processes of disappearance in relation to memory and history, revealing Cap Ferret today as a place where leisure, recreation, historical remains, and memorial space coexist. A second part of the project focuses on remembrance. Autrement on devient fou…, an interview with Henri Lavrillat, who was forced to build these fortifications during compulsory work service, accompanied by a series of photographs of functional architecture on Cap Ferret, now inhabited by holidaymakers, yet sometimes situated on the very sites of the wartime worker camps. Questions of place and time, culminated in Se Souvenir (2013), an ephemeral installation for which I pasted Lavrillat’s memories directly onto the walls he was compelled to construct.
Autrement on devient fou
This book documents an artistic project centered on an interview with Henri Lavrillat (*1920), who recalls his compulsory labor service in Cap Ferret and Bordeaux during the Second World War. The conversation was initiated by my photographic series ‘Disappearance – The Atlantic Wall around Cap Ferret’, which explores the remnants of wartime architecture along the Atlantic coast.
The book includes the whole transcript, a photographic exploration of camping sites and functional architecture on Cap Ferret at that point in time, material from the main project and the documentation of my performance and ephemeral installation ‘Se Souvenir’, as well as essays by Inge Marszolek and myself.
What’s included:
- 96 pages: 16 x 23cm, two papers
- Linen hardcover: Silkscreen title
- 42 illustrations: reproduced from analog c-prints
- Interview: Witness Henri Lavrillat
- Two essays: German/French
- Edition: 400
Essays by:
- Inge Marszolek - Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
- Markus Oberndorfer - Se Souvenir
Credits:
- Concept: Markus Oberndorfer
- Design & Font: Nik Thönen (binnenland)
- All Photographs: Markus Oberndorfer
- Publisher: Selfpublished
- © Markus Oberndorfer 2014
Supported by:
- Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Forum Culturel Autrichien Paris, Institut für Romanistik Wien, Kultur Land OÖ
