DANSER SOUS LA PLUIE

2025

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“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” Seneca

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Un air de fête, a project selected through a cultural call for projects initiated by the Fondation des Petits Frères des Pauvres.

 

As part of this project, I invited older people from the Dunkirk area to take part in a collective artwork. During this residency, I invited them to create a series of imagined portraits inspired by their personal stories and aspirations.

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I had the privilege of meeting some extraordinary people. They shared their life experiences, their joys, their struggles and their sorrows with remarkable simplicity. Above all, I was struck by one thing they all had in common: an overwhelming thirst for life. Most of these women and men belong to the post-war generation. Many knew from childhood what it meant to go without. Yet theirs is also a generation that witnessed life improve over the decades they lived through. Perhaps this is why, deep down, they remain optimists.

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Their isolation, whether real or perceived, is above all linked to the loss of a freedom they hold dear. There is no single way to feel isolated; there are as many experiences as there are older people. Each person is at a stage of life that leads towards the unknown: living at home, in a retirement home or a care facility; being alone or feeling lonely; no longer being able to get around or express oneself; feeling sadness or grieving those we have loved…

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These are profoundly human feelings, ones many of us will experience at some point in our lives. And yet, to speak of older people as a single group is to confine them to a category, to a world apart.

I invite you to discover Dancing in the Rain, a project in which these women and men show us that they are so much more than a category. Through these portraits, I invite you to look beyond their faces and see the young women and men they still are.

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A full life is a life
In which we have cried and laughed,
Where pain sometimes finds its way in,
Yet we share it all, unceasingly,
In life’s gentle twilight.