ANTARCTIC

Toward white fortress

To sail in the Antarctic is to take the measure of immoderation. It means risking vertigo, absence, emptiness and wonder. Vers la forteresse blanche is a polar boat-movie that takes us through the looking glass. To a strange, implacable and enchanting world. A frozen stage where life and death exchange lines. An otherworld where the sirens of the Unknown sing until they make our own walls vibrate...

Soundscape (40') realize with the support of International Polar Foundation, SCAM, RTBF and SACD. Broadcast "Ouïe Dire" Pascale Tison La RTBF. et Radio Campus Bruxelles

Beyond the ice floes

Setting course for these cold, numb seas means taking part in this sacred geography. This geography of wonders, the very geography that forges myths and crystallizes hopes. The ice floes reveal a battlefield of eternal proportions, where the elements clash in fierce combat. Whatever the outcome, victors and vanquished drift towards the same nothingness. The only thing that remains is a frozen stage where life and death exchange replicas. Hell and heaven reunited, transformed into one or the other by the grace of wind and light. Like a geographical allegory of man's destiny.

Realize with the support of International Polar Foundation, SCAM Festival opening broadcast Festival "Etonnants Voyageurs" in Saint-Malo. Boradcast in Short Cut International in Lucania and in Polar Festival Pleneuf Val André.

"Every time evidence collapses, the poet responds with a salvo of the future". (René Char)

If there's one person for whom these lines have a special resonance, it's Ernest Shackleton. One of the greatest and most endearing figures in Antarctic history. In 1918, aboard his ship "L'Endurance", with its particularly prescient name, he set out to attack the South Pole. But his ship was blocked by thick pack ice and, after a slow agony, was crushed by the ice. The drifting pack ice, criss-crossed by ocean cracks, would become their home for almost eighteen months. To save his men, Shackleton set out with a handful of men in a simple rowboat to tackle the dreaded Southern Ocean. Faced with veritable walls of foam, with too little of the horizon to know exactly where he was, he nevertheless reached his destination: the island of South Georgia. But the violent storm that was raging caused them to land on the wrong side of the island. To reach the whaling community, they still had to climb the high mountains where no one had ever ventured before. At the end of a hallucinatory walk, exhausted and freezing cold, they reached the community of men. From there, he was able to launch rescue operations. From this wild odyssey, he brought back all his men alive! But he never reached the South Pole... A lover of poets and adventure, Ernest Shackleton has gone down in polar legend as a man of exceptional fortitude and endurance, who put the lives of his companions ahead of honors and glory... His book "L'odyssée de l'Endurance" (The Odyssey of Endurance) is a sober and precise account of his adventure. A powerful account prefaced by Paul Emile Victor, who saw in him "a high-flying soul" and paid him this tribute: "Such is the primary virtue of the adventurer worthy of this fine name: to make the adventure itself already an accomplishment, beyond the hazards of the best and the worst, of success and failure. This is what Shackleton the Great achieves here, better than any other man I know of!"

Article in the magazine "Grands Reportages" (10 pages) about my expedition to Antarctica aboard the Russian cargo ship Ivan Papanin with the Belare 2008 mission led by Alain Hubert and the International Polar Foundation in Brussels. There they built the first zero-emission polar base "Princess Elisabeth". Many thanks to Alain Hubert and his foundation for making my childhood dream of going to Antarctica come true.