“I come from here but I've never seen these plants. They're everywhere. The ground I walk on is warm, moist and fragile. I lie down to feel my surroundings, and as I do, I feel the all- encompassing warmth even more strongly. I don't have anything to write this with, so I use the crumbling rock around me to blacken these pages. I always knew I was going home when the terrils appeared at the edge of the highway. You can't miss those black mountains in a flat country. If I'd known I'd come back here, back to what feels like home to me, but where I can't find myself, to finally find answers. I finish writing with my rocks. My hands are blackened. And the ground heals while I climb.”

Photographing terrils to approach the memories of the land where I grew up. Investigating both violence and resilience around the soils in order to understand the impact of violences produced on bodies and from bodies.

These strange black mountains are the result of nearly three centuries of mining. They are witnesses of human exploitation of the land and of communities still scarred by the economic and environmental consequences of coal mining. In this region among many others, the issue of violence directed against the land is also an issue of violence against bodies and within families. In fact, violence directed inside lands, living bodies and people. Who is being exploited? Who is exploiting? What are the traces of this exploitation? Where does this violence come from and how do people survive it? How do we deal with the aftermath? In this project, I am interested in the very matter of these territories, and tried to find clues to their survival and adaptation mechanisms.

This work thus begins a study of the capacity of a particular ecosystem to change in order to find its state of stability. Questioning the inside/outside duality allows me to understand the interactions that occur and how they evolve. The soil of the terrils is still forming and is home to an intriguing and unusual flora, and illustrates human attempts to recondition the site. For now presented as an investigation, this ongoing work traces the visual evidence of these transformations. Finally, my own body experiences raise other questions: What gestures carry with them the violence of the past? What gestures heal bodies and soil? By slowly surveying these places that are both familiar and distant, I have tried to (re)connect with them in order to learn from the inside and build my own memories.