Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue

Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue

All these manufactured objects found during daily walks are not Jade pebbles thousands of years old. Bur for several centuries, it appears that sapiens know how to distinguish them. The least controversial conclusion for the moment is that we are faced with serious indications of an affirmed awareness that these discoveries are no more eternal than the sapiens.

On my daily pilgrimage, I sometimes think of the "misery row", a word that the ancients had chosen to name the place where they had emigrated to live. What they meant was that they had had to clear the land, remove the stones and cultivate the plots. The chosen territory wanted it that way.

For some years now, I have been walking along a row with one still active farmer, a representation of sixteen percent of the six families established in the middle of the last century. The word misery has been replaced by "Cochrane Road", as if to magnify the original place.

I find objects with a sacred quality, with the potential to develop a visual language of empathy for those who were the last people to touch them. My photographic approach challenges their aestheticism. Everything becomes clearer : testimony of dispossession, failed memory, reflected image of ourselves.

Contrary to jade which, according to certain beliefs, had healing powers or the ability to ward off evil spirits, Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue is sometimes invoked to recover health or find lost objects. Many were never found. Like the farmers, they gradually disappear from sight.