DANSER SOUS LA PLUIE

2022

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

A Celebration of Life (Un air de fête) — a project selected through the cultural initiative launched by the Fondation des Petits Frères des Pauvres.

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As part of this project, I invited older people from the Dunkirk area to take part in a collective work. 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, joys, struggles and sorrows with me, with remarkable openness. Above all, I was struck by one thing they all seemed to share: an overwhelming thirst for life.

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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 living conditions improve over the decades they lived through. Perhaps this is why, at heart, they remain optimists.

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Their isolation, whether real or perceived, is above all bound up with the loss of a freedom they hold dear. There is no single way to experience isolation; there are as many experiences as there are older people. Each person is at a stage in life that leads towards the unknown: living at home, moving into residential or nursing care, being alone or feeling lonely, no longer being able to get around, losing the ability to express oneself, feeling sad or grieving those we have loved…

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These are deeply human feelings that 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 set them apart in a world of their own.

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I invite you to discover Danser sous la pluie (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 wept and laughed,

Where pain may sometimes find its way in,

Yet life is shared, again and again,

In the gentle twilight of our days.