Maja A. Ngom

"The genius was that between these palaces and the ocean there was a very large empty space. Nothing but the ocean. Yes, it was to die for with such beauty. It was crazy. The sea came to the edge of the palaces when there was a storm and the foam of the storm, yes that's it: without danger. Deauville [...] was abandoned to the sea, or given to it. The empty square was a kind of echo chamber. [Marguerite Duras, Deauville la mort (Éd. de L'Herne, 2005)

"When I came to Deauville, I expected to face the sea, but I found a vast empty space. I inhabited it, this ribbon between the sea and the rocks placed there to protect the bowels of Deauville. This wide strip of land between water and land, deserted, allowed me to breathe, and to create again. This is how I came across her. She was waiting motionless, a photograph ready to be taken, a silhouette coming from a distant elsewhere. Her face turned away, still evasive. Her body resting on the stones as if to embrace them, sometimes overwhelmed by their heaviness, never yet crushed by them. Some days as I watched her from afar I could see her playing with the cold remains of these stones. Every day she used the same rhythms: those of the sea and those of her work: making and unmaking her nest, her shelter. Every day she gave back her own body to her roots and every day she tried to settle down, to find her place between sea and earth. And then one day she disappeared. The sea, was only whispers carried by the deafening noise of the waves, gently swept the sand on which she had stood: I let my mother caress my face as she did when I was a child. I feel the salt melting on my tongue, the wind teasing my lacy hair. From this mountain made of sand I can find her when she returns at dusk. I bring her stones, which melt into pebbles in her mouth."