BRETIN Frédérique

Je suis morte à Auschwitz et personne ne le voit

France

2017Jury

Further to the testimony of Charlotte Delbo, a French member of the Resistance and a deportee in 1943, Frédérique Bretin travelled to the swampland a few kilometers from Ausschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. In those disciplinary facilities that aimed towards dehumanization and devastation through work, prisoners were forced to dig pits for the swamps to be drained, in order to then fertilize the dried out lands with human ashes. Those mute and quiet swamps, steeped in history, now contrast with Birkenau’s monumental infrasctruture, and echo the pitfalls of a petrified memory and the tough task to decipher the present.

About the artist

Born in 1962,  Frédérique Bretin lives and works in Dordogne (France). She graduated in 2011 at the  École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles (France). Her work is part of a minimalist approach, through the study of space as either an expression of human activity or a natural organization of things.