La cendre et l’écume

La cendre et l’écume – TIt all starts with a tree uprooted by the wind. The one we thought would last forever is lying on its side, it is up to us to make it disappear. Once the sovereign is on the ground, its size seems derisory. Soon, he is cut into calculated portions, his branches are assembled in bundles, he is dismembered branch by branch. The work completed, there remains only the stump, whose mass the ground did not know how to retain. The spectacle of these roots provokes vertigo; it is the time of the tree that is exposed to our eyes, the past that it has lived, the future that it was building.

This experience will lead Ludovic Debeurme to undertake an intimate temporal journey. The disappearance of his parents and the arrival of his daughter have placed him halfway through a life that can no longer be satisfied with itself. Each being is the fruit of the destinies that preceded him and his existence announces the lives that will follow him. Swinging from immediate time to the abyss of the past, recalled in a present irradiated by the future, Ludovic Debeurme experiences simultaneous times. The eras overlap and intertwine in a whirlwind of stories, memories and moments diffracting the images of intertwined lives.

A book of gentleness and anxiety, La cendre et l’écume explores the dizziness that overtakes us when we reach “the age our parents were at our age”. Ludovic Debeurme’s supple line tells us with simplicity the depth of the emotional layers that run through us. The mourning, the joys and the chance draw our lives without consulting us. But it will always be up to us to flush out the serenity that hides there.