Salesse

The swallows and wind sing as if there were no one left in Salesse. Yet, beneath them someone is busy… an ogre. There is a lot to do in the undergrowth, in front of the building standing there like some monumental vestige. The ogre is at work, hobbling from one task to another, logs of wood to set in order, grass to be cut. The ogre grouses and grumbles, his patois is for the logs and grass. The ogre has a name and, besides, he is no ogre. Damien is a former farmhand who still lives on the large Salesse estate, in the Limousin region. We surmise that his whole life depends on these small jobs that, one morning, he offered (but turning his back) to Geoffrey Chambord’s camera; his mutterings are the music he plays for himself while working, a litany whose sole purpose is to keep the rasp of his scythe company. This life and music are supposedly well-known; the French countryside and the elderly who may well be the last to mutter below the swallows. But the Salasse that Geoffrey Chambord’s camera reinvents is an alien and mythological territory, a country of stones and giants on a sloping land under a wavering light, akin to that invented by Pedro Costa at Fontainhas in the Lisbon suburbs (Colossal Youth)

Jérôme Momcilovic