La Ligne

The bunker has always been an object of fascination ; knowing only its shape or its threshold, we have to imagine the rest that lies beneath. Symbolically, this also applies to the Maginot Line : although everyone has heard of it, not many can really describe it. Its name echoes like a receptacle for fantasies. The shapes of its bunkers match this symbolic dimension. Through his pictures, Alexandre Guirkinger wanted to share his fascination for this extraordinary relic of aged modernity. The chosen and photographed bunkers are those whose shape, position and contours give the picture something more than simply the material capturing of a boundary: a kind of science fiction landscape, a trace of land art, a modernist architecture, a contemporary geoglyph.

The gap between the abundance of the relics of the line and its few contemporary representations offer an exciting playing-field for questioning our relationship to landscape, to the boundary, to the limit. This is the starting point of Tristan Garcia’s short story.