A reconstruction of the history of the camp of Saliers (France) and the people who lived there.

Having learned of the existence of the Saliers camp, in which gypsies were interned during the Second World War, Mathieu Pernot set out to give a name, a history and a face to those who lived there.

"Le camp de Saliers, sorte de village-modèle, devait servir à la fois pour réfuter les arguments de la propagande étrangère qui s’insurgeait contre les camps d’internement français, et pour regrouper et fixer les nomades."
- Mathieu Pernot

“After discovering the existence of a concentration camp for gypsies in a historian's work, Mathieu Pernot noted with surprise that no trace of it remained today: "A strange silence seemed to resonate around the memory of this camp which had physically disappeared and whose history barely existed except in the imprecise memories of a few elders of the village of Saliers.” The silence which bothers the artist is that of erasure, of amnesia of history. That a desire to forget suited the State and sedentary society is nothing new. George Didi-Huberman called this voluntary erasure of traces by Nazism and the Final Solution “machine of disimagination”, the very one which was able to destroy all the vestiges, including the incendiary instrument, crematorium V at Auschwitz.2 Although the historical fact of the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people is already written in history, it is necessary to remember it and continue to teach it to future generations. Much more silent is the desire to liquidate the gypsies.”
- Luiz Claudio Da Coasta,