Blockhaus

This photographic project documents the final moments of a bunker built in Lorient, France between 1941 and 1943. Designed as an air-raid shelter for the German army, it survived the Allied bombings that destroyed 90% of the city before being demolished in 2009, following a debate opposing historical memory and the desire to erase a scar left by the Occupation.

This work is part of a broader reflection on the trace of absence. Photographing this bunker just before its destruction means observing the transition from a material presence to a memorial survival.

The choice of blurriness is central in this approach. Forms dissolve, outlines become uncertain, as if the place were already slipping away from view at the very moment it is being photographed.

This lack of sharpness also conveys the heavy, silent, and timeless atmosphere that inhabited the bunker, while acting as a metaphor for memory itself: fragmentary, unstable, and haunted.

Through these images, the "blockhaus" appears as a ghostly presence, suspended between memory and disappearance. Photography then becomes the sensitive trace of an absence.