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The American artist, Robert Smithson, said: “Each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, always conceals a substrata of disaster.” I have used this sentence as a “guide” throughout my journey on foot over the area of “The Salient of Ypres”. For me, The Salient was more than anything an endless source of tales. Practically every square metre of the area, as you well know, is associated with an event, a story, a memory. On several occasions, this profusion gave me the impression that my journey was not a mere trip through the physical space which I had travelled over but also a journey through different “dimensions.” By walking, I wanted not only to travel through and visit the “space” in which the events that made the Salient so famous had taken place, but also turn back the “time” which separated me from those years – return to the present to observe, listen and feel. I sought out signs and consequences, sometimes hidden, sometimes still evident, left by the conflict in the countryside extending around Ypres. It is these signs which have ultimately created this very special landscape. In an effort to have a better understanding of this unique area – one of the First World War’s most iconic landscapes – and tell its story with photography, I have walked for more than 1000 km around this small region.
Walking and photographing I’ve tried to re-create a map of the Salient (the umpteenth) which can depict and document not only the visible, present countryside I have travelled across on foot, but also the absent landscapes which memory has revived. Lastly, with the kind of pilgrimage I made, I also sought a deeper understanding with regard to recollection and the landscape, and how these two elements are interconnected. To use the words of Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst: “Since to follow a trail is to remember how it goes, making one’s way in the present is itself a recollection of the past…onward movement is itself a return.”
Walk to remember. Walk on a quest for a memory or memories. The memory evoked by a landscape which continues, resiliently, to reveal battle scars. Perhaps, also the memory of those who died in this war; a memory which, akin to a spirit, continues to hang in the bluish air thickening around the birches, that stand guard before a cemetery at twilight. On a summer’s evening.
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