LA JEUNE FILLE ET L’ENFANT / Stefano Marchionini

By Dust Magazine / 21 Aug ’11 / art, photography / No Comments

It was the evening of a bright but sunless day. The girl from the summer camp was walking along the sea front. She was with the little boy. He walked a bit to one side of her. They were both walking slowly. She spoke to him. She told him she loved him. Loved a child.The boy looked. Looked at everything – at the sea, at the beaches, into space. His eyes were gray. GRAY. Like a storm, like stone, like the northern sky, the sea, the mind that is immanent in matter, in life. Gray as thought. As time.

As the centuries past and to come all rolled into one. GRAY.

He was wearing a white swimsuit. He was thin. You could se his body plainly. He was to tall and seemed to be made of glass, like a windowpane-you could see already how he would turn out. You could see the perfect proportions and joints, the long muscles. The miraculous fragility of wrists and ankles, of the bones, the folds in the neck, the legs, the hands.

You could see it all already. And the head, emerging like a tangent, a beacon, the culminating tip of a flower.

She was carrying him on her shoulders. She was singing, the song about resting by the spring and never forgetting him. She’s as white as chalk. She’s afraid. But she’s laughing. She’s so young, yet at the same time half dead. She knows that.

Marguerite Duras, Yann Andréa Steiner