Lucile Bertrand - 'amnesia'

In twelve sequences and twelve languages, the video amnesia pays tribute to the poets and writers who preserve the memory of what some are trying to forget or even deny.

In order to bring back more than just the memory of some past or still open conflicts – in Rwanda, Greece, Turkey, Cambodia, Syria, Russia, South Africa, former Yugoslavia, among American Indians and the nuclear disaster in Japan –, on one side of a split screen, a series of narrators say or read excerpts from contemporary literature, while on the other side, a witness-dancer listens and reacts throughout the video.

War is one of the foundations of History as in many individual lives. Even when conducted far away, wars invade our daily routine and leave us helpless. When one knows that winners and losers are finally so close, don’t wars seem even more frightening? Is it possible that the victims – or the next generation – can in turn become executioners? Denial being a second violence, aren’t its consequences as dramatic as the first? This is what relentlessly question those who follow one another in amnesia.

Lucile Bertrand.