Photographing silence. Photographing absence. What could be more moving than a photograph that expresses time gone by? What could be more silent than a stone? And yet what could be more disturbing than an ancient building with closed shutters? It's an almost shamanic experience between me, my camera and these walls that are still standing. At the sight of a facade showing all the marks of time, in total inertia, in total silence, a magic happens and my imagination starts to run wild trying to find out what these ancient dwellings might have housed. They end up telling me stories, they end up being very talkative, these old stones and these old cracked woods.

What are the life stories behind these closed doors? Would I be photographing, decades late, the joys, the sorrows, the ordinariness or the unhappiness of past lives? But where have the inhabitants gone? I think I can hear the laughter of children, the crackle of an open fire, the sound of the corn mill; yet, no, nothing ... but yes, I'm sure, behind the pervasive calm of the place ... Maybe I'm photographing ghosts. It's a secret calm accompanied by the smell of saltpetre, cobwebs and conquering ivy, the vegetation that always reclaims its rights in the end, patient, seemingly motionless and mute.

What if I went inside? No, that would be sacrilege. To enter the past of those who are absent without being invited, to desecrate places closed by time. I'm going to continue to keep my distance and bear witness to the fact that certain silences are often the result of exoduses, wars, bankruptcies, exhaustion and that, in a great din, youth and its adventures, loves and energy have gone elsewhere. But may the silence of the old stones help us not to forget everything, for they have so much to whisper to us. And I love being the shaman who helps the thundering living to remember.