Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine, and even Sudan… Conflicts have never been more prevalent in our daily lives. Wars saturate the news and photographs of these tragedies flood newspapers and social media. These images typically focus on one thing: ruins. This is what the temporary exhibition “Silence after Impact” decodes, currently on display until July 12 at the Memorial’14-18 in Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, near Lens in Pas-de-Calais, a territory completely destroyed during World War I.
The Northern French cities devastated, houses destroyed, barely standing churches… The starting point of this exhibition, “Silence after Impact”, is obviously the Great War. Black and white photographs depict soldiers in the ruined streets of Arras or Lens, or civilians trying to survive amidst the rubble. “The North of France was almost entirely destroyed during World War I,” confirms Juliette Gouesnard, programming manager at the Memorial. She points out the difficulty photojournalists faced in immortalizing combat due to heavy equipment. Ruins became a way to testify to the horror of the conflict, avoiding showing bodies due to censorship.
Another bloody but lesser-known site of World War I, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette also hosts a necropolis where over 42,000 fighters are buried, including French, American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers. An infinity ring was erected in 2014, inscribed with over 580,000 names of fallen soldiers in the Artois region from 1914 to 1918. This memorial serves as a way to remind visitors of the consequences and magnitude of the Great War.
And a century after the end of this conflict, 700,000 fighters remain missing on the battlefields in Northern and Eastern France.
