Output details

An Embarrassment of Stains, Camp Joffre. Exhibition and symposium examining the remnants of internment Camp Joffre in South West France.

This project examines the remnants of internment Camp Joffre in South West France, a site seemingly resistent to trauma seduction. Between August and October 1942, 2,251 of the 5,714 Jewish internees were forwarded to the internment camp at Drancy for onward transport principally to Auschwitz. 110 of them were children. Uniquely, Camp Joffre along with a site at Milles was a French-administered institution within Vichy France, an authority which did not appear in the history syllabus of french highschools until the 1990’s.

Currently the site is not physically restricted to the public. I have documented its slow disintegration over a period of time and what has been revealed through reflective monitoring is embodied within this work.

These 34 photographs illustrate informal cruelty, geographic allure and the fragility of an unwelcome, resilient location within a contemporary urban reality. Grouped together, these outputs, the exhibition and the symposium, offer complementary forms of research, some reflective and some practically based. This series proposes a line of conjectural challenges which explore the question of what constitutes a sacred space and what characteristics must a location have for it to be considered venerable or worthy of remembrance. What set of circumstances could see a site such as that at Auschwitz Birkenau redeveloped. The images fuse domestic iconoclastic minutiae with the reverential and the hallowed in order to re-present the site to a local populace who are about to have the unveiling of a previously discordant history imposed upon them during the construction of Rudy Ricciotti’s Historial Memorial du Camp de Rivesaltes, which is due to open in 2015.

The exhibition was attended by 380 people and 37 attended the symposium