archatlas
Black Seasons Julien Coquentin
My black seasons were those of childhood, seasons plunged into darkness, where the time year after year always bury a little more. The photographed territory is in Europe, where I grew up, and landscapes are similar to my bedside table, they hide my memory, with all the smells, tastes, sensations that I was able to experience.
How do we go beyond the territory of childhood when it looks like to pens?
In my memory, it is bounded by some hills, some meadows, forest, village, countryside as a playground. And that’s what we were, the country’s children, the children of a landscape. I had the chance to grow in a protected environment, we were a few friends, animals with a territory. Young dogs peeing in the grass and mark their habitat. We had our huts, hiding places, secrets. This child then wrote my relationship to space and returning to those places is like being a kid, eternal, part of the earth. My black seasons are fields, peasants, the darkness of a church, the silence of the forest, mad dashes and lowing of cattle, the inexorable passage of time between my fingers.
Images and text by Julien Coquentin
