Meeting between Enki Bilal Remy Ourdan on May 4, 2023

Enki Bilal and Rémy Ourdan: The terrible sincerity of children’s drawings

These are two of its prestigious sponsors of the exhibition. The designer and artist Enki Bilal and the Journal Le Monde correspondent in Ukraine Rémy Ourdan were at the MIR on May 4 for the launch of Déflagrations, in the company of its curator Zérane S, Girardeau.

Traveling companions since 2017 of the association of the same name at the origin of the exhibition, these strong personalities spoke in front of a packed room about their motivations and the importance of saving and showing these 140 extraordinary creations. “There is a terrible sincerity in these testimonies,” comments the author of Phalanges of the Black Order . The line brings something extremely strong. It is not calculated, but on the contrary reproduced in a kind of emergency. Correspondent for Guerre au Monde since the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Rémy Ourdan has regularly seen drawings of child victims of war pass before his eyes. They speak to him immediately: “They show a brutal, unbearable reality, which we do not see on television screens or in photos.”

For Zérane Girardeau, “exhibiting these drawings gives a place to children, leading us to better recognize their experiences of violence, their memories and their expressions in their own right. It also means strengthening our vigilance and our resistance in the face of rising discourses which construct figures of the “enemy”.”

Find out more about the Déflagrations exhibition

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