In the summer of 2022, the Gironde region burned. Two separate fires sparked the blazes: one began on July 12 in La Teste-de-Buch, caused by a vehicle breakdown, and the other in Landiras, of uncertain origin. These two blazes, fueled by drought and winds, engulfed more than 30,000 hectares of forest in just a few days. Just as many hectares of maritime pines went up in smoke, taking with them an entire swathe of landscape, memory, and connections. Three years later, the exhibition “600°” by the LesAssociés collective revisits these fires, not to illustrate their violence, but to question their aftermath. What the fire leaves behind. What it reveals.
In the halls of the Marquèze ecomuseum, in the heart of the Landes region, the images don’t shout. They observe. They record the scars and compose the silences. “We didn’t want to show the fire in its spectacular dimension, as the media did,” explains Alexandre Dupeyron, one of the six photographers in the collective. “We wanted to bear witness to the aftermath, the emptiness, the trauma, the slow reconstruction.”
After the fire, the human flame
The project wasn’t born in a hurry. For two and a half years, the members of the collective traveled through the disaster-stricken areas, collecting nearly 80 hours of testimonies: residents, hunters, newcomers to rural areas, firefighters, researchers, loggers… A dense material that permeates a work that is both political and sensitive. Thus, Alexandre Dupeyron, Michaël Parpet, Joël Peyrou, Alban Dejong, Élie Monferier, and Olivier Panier des Touches claim an approach that is at the crossroads of documentary, journalism, and contemporary creation.
Each photographer then followed their own lead. Joël Peyrou, for example, began by listening at length before taking out his camera. “His photography always comes after the interview. It requires that preliminary intimacy, that trust built through words ,” explains Dupeyron. These faces lined up in one of the rooms of the exhibition embody a patiently collected voice. Opposite, verbatim excerpts from these conversations give substance to the images, and goosebumps arise when we discover the experiences lived by the inhabitants facing the fire.
The collective doesn’t provide any answers, however. It creates tension. “The forest belongs to everyone: to gatherers, to hunters, to industrialists. And in the face of a catastrophe of this magnitude, we have to question what we want to do with it.” Some photographers immerse themselves in local communities, others create plastic installations from burned materials. One owner even chose not to replant, to leave the forest fallow. “We used these trees for an inverted installation, as a way of reminding us that there is another possible way forward,” explains Alexandre Dupeyron. “Fire is also what makes everything unstable, everything fragile,” he adds. “We wanted this exhibition to reflect this instability. Nothing is fixed, not even our certainties about what a landscape is. It is often said that nature is fragile, but I find it very strong, considering everything we do to it…”
An exhibition rooted in the region
In Marquèze, the exhibition is spread across two large rooms, designed as passageways. The first combines different image regimes: photographs that reveal what the fire burned or melted, creating astonishing sculptures in particular, aerial photographs, but also archives. One of the walls is entirely devoted to the front pages of the newspaper Sud-Ouest , tracing the advance of the flames day by day, until the moment when the fire became out of control. “We doubled the front page of July 19, because on that day, two editions were published, reflecting the dramatic escalation.”
Another highlight: a series of minimalist photographs, inspired by Japanese aesthetics, that capture the rebirth of plants. Shoots, stumps, traces. “These are silent images, but very powerful,” notes Dupeyron. “They bear witness to a return to life, without pathos.”
In this same room, charred objects are presented on plinths made from wooden pallets, a nod to the industrial forest economy. “The pallet is the ultimate global object. It has traveled to more countries than you and I. It is the very symbol of what this forest produces.”
The “600°” project also features photographs from the museum’s archives, including those of the major fires of 1949. Some images are missing, others are repeated: “An allegory of incomplete memory,” Dupeyron summarizes. “We quickly forget, we reconstruct identically, like a survival reflex.”
In the second room, the stump of a monumental tree sits in the center: Janus. This pine log, recovered from the forest of La Teste, was worked by Alexandre Dupeyron like a totem sculpture. “Janus is both strength and memory. An almost mythological trace.” The most directly documentary photographs occupy the rest of the space: makeshift shelters, silhouettes of firefighters, houses bordering charred areas. “Fire follows human beings” Dupeyron reminds us. “There is no fire without human activity.”
The scenography, created largely from reused materials, extends this message. The photos are sometimes hung on kraft paper, or framed with reclaimed wood. Nothing is neutral. “We wanted everything, even the exhibition layout, to make sense.” She extends this message to another emblematic site, the Dune du Pilat: designed with young architects and local artisans, cabins serve as exhibition stands: they also embody the fragile utopia of “living differently.” “The challenge is also to provoke dialogue. The forest divides. Environmentalists, hunters: they all love the forest, but don’t talk to each other. If our exhibition helps create a minimum of listening between these worlds, then it will have fulfilled its role.”
By its very form, “600°” questions the photographer’s place. Not only as a witness, but also as a conduit and assembler. The book that accompanies the exhibition, compiled with anthropologists, writers, and scientists, extends this ambition: to create a shared work. “This work is collective. Each photographer has their own style, but we share political concerns. We are not seeking a homogeneous aesthetic, but a depth of perspective.”
Faced with a disrupted territory, the LesAssociés collective has thus chosen to listen. Faced with the incomplete memory—that of the 1949 fires, for example, already forgotten—it opposes a desire for transmission. Faced with the brutality of the fire, a slowness, an attention. It is not a question of looking at the ashes with nostalgia, but of opening up a field of possibilities. “Inhabiting the forest is not consuming it,” reminds Dupeyron. At a time when megafires are multiplying on every continent, “600°” resonates like a distant—but clear—signal of what art can still produce: a space where we think together, from what is burning.
“600°” is an exhibition by the LesAssociés collective, on view until December 31, 2025. More information on the collective’s website.
