Mazargues Anonymous
Installation d'images 248 x 540 cm, Imprimée jet d'encre,
400 images, 11 X 22 cm chacune
2012- (projet en cours de réalisation)
"Every name has a story. And all these stories become history."
Thousands of soldiers from different colonies - Fiji, India, New Zealand, China, Indochina, Senegal, who sacrificed for the British and French military during first and second world wars, were buried in the Marzargue military cemetery in the south area of Marseille, France. Sorted by names of soldiers, troop numbers ,and some personnal information, tidy tombstones not only accommodated the wreckage of soldiers, but also compress their personal history. They then became faceless anonymous in the eyes of local residents.
The colonial troops soldier cemetery in the colonial empire is the epitome and testimony of the order of not only mondern world but also contemporary world. Under the impetus of the state apparatus and war, they had lost their "human" status and became "objects" that could be arbitrarily transferred and consumed.
Their situation is similar to refugees and immigrants in today's world, from different countries and cultures, war-affected, forced across borders, and being the underprivileged minority in the world order. They can’t get rid of their identity of being the Other, neither get the dignity as equal and free people should have.
In this project, I took photos of all the tombstones in the cemetery and selected four hundred images from them. These photos were selected according to the same proportion (nationality, belief, age, etc.) as the original number of tombstones. I erased the name and military reference of each tombstone and presented the erased information in the manual, Mazarage Anonymous. This manual contains not only personal information of soldiers, but also their further information, which I collected, from the Internet and the archive research.
When the audience reads this manual and look for a tombstone that may coincide to the informations and the name, the whole process is like an evocation. The spectator will try to distinguish the character and personal history of each soldier from a homogeneous and blurred single group of the Other.