Maya Schweizer: Le soldat mourrant des Milles/ Der sterbende Soldat von Les Milles
30 October – 31 October, 2015
Screening and catalogue presentation:
Der sterbende Soldat von Les Milles / Le soldat mourant des Milles
30 October, 7 pm
Screening and artist talk with Maya Schweizer and Anna Lena von Helldorff (graphic design)
The dying soldier of Les Milles
2014
HdV, 13 min, color, Les Milles
The “Square of the 8th of May”, the former rail station of Les Milles and an area to play boules.
A few meters away on the “Road of the Deportees”, the inscription Les Milles is still visible.
A bit further behind the railroad tracks is the memorial of Les Milles, alongside a former brick factory which was once used as a French internment and deportation camp.
The memorial is placed right in the center of the “Square of the 8th of May”, “The Avenue of the Allies” and “The Road of the French Memory”.
Three times a day a freight train passes by.
Boules crash into each other, bricks and clinkers crack … dust. The square is empty.
A soldier rises. He is wounded, holding himsef back so he doesn’t fall on the bag with all the ammunition.
Once built in remembrance of the French soldiers, it is now a memorial for the victims of the village Les Milles in the 1920s after the destruction of the First World War.
Pretty soon it will become a watchful observer and witness of the Second World War.
The forecourt of the station, surprisingly the monument remains the guarantor of the remembrance of the unknowen heroes.
It melts with the dust and the sound of the Boules…
– Maya Schweizer