Adèle Martin

On dirait le Sud/ It looks like the South

Historically the French region of les Alpes-Maritimes, at the border of Italy and France, has seen various currents of migration. Between September 1938 and May 1940, many Jewish Germans and Austrians fleeing Nazi Germany made their way into France from the Italian town of Ventimiglia. A couple of decades later, migrants from the Middle East and from Africa are using the same route to arrive in France.

Since the 18th Century, les Alpes-Maritimes have been a great inspiration in the plein air painting tradition. Their aestheticization has persisted in the collective imagination of the South of France evocative of the smell of fresh lavender, the vibrant color of tomatoes and its hot, dry Mediterranean summers.  A reproduction of Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1885) is exhibited alongside anonymous photographs of different landscapes of the Alpes-Maritimes. 

However, the aesthetic gaze of these pictures does not reveal the reality of migration and of the border regime in that area. In response to the increase in migration, France made a unilateral decision to introduce border checks at the Franco-Italian border in 2011, thereby breaching the Schengen agreement. Due to the growing presence of the police and military in the trains coming from Italy, irregular migrants started entering France from the Alp mountains.The soundscape presented here collages sounds of the landscape and sounds of migration. It challenges the romanticization of the South of France and gives an insight into a double reading of these aestheticized French landscapes, while reflecting on the complexity of representing reality.

Photographs with audio, 2021