Résonance, From the Chemin des Dames to Sarajevo, Medresa, Sarajevo June-July 2014

For more than twenty years, Gérard Rondeau wanders the tracks of the First World War, from the plains of Flanders to the trenches of Verdun, favoring especially the lands of the Chemin des Dames and those of Champagne.

With the novelist Yves Gibeau (author of the mythical "Allons z’enfants"), a man fascinated by the war 14-18, he travels tirelessly around the places of the tragedy, in search of the ghosts of the Very last one. After the disappearance of Gibeau in 1994, he will be in spite of him the regular witness of his left presbytery and will publish "The Ghosts of the Chemin des Dames" (Seuil).

In Reims - martyred city which will become a symbol for France - whose silent columnist he is for a long time, Rondeau leans on the young surrealists of the Big Game to imagine a personal reading of the destroyed city.

Between 1992 and 1996, Gérard Rondeau makes numerous journeys in the city of besieged Sarajevo, European victim of the last trenches of the century. He finds his friends there, among whom Zlatko Dizdarevic, then editor-in-chief of the daily paper Oslobodenje. Together, they will publish among others "Sarajevo, The Silence, and nothing surrounding" (Actes Sud).

Round trip between Sarajevo and the East of France, in a geography of the war tracks, but also of time, 14-18, 1992-1996, this singular journey of Gérard Rondeau leans on its attendance of both the places of the World War I and those of Bosnia and Herzegovina at war.

Mixing personal stories with his privileged witnesses, the universe of Rondeau entails us in his motionless wanderings on the path of the war, his work shows the pain of the presbytery which is dying, the silence of the bruised landscapes, it speaks about death, about memory and about absence.