Julien Sunye

Black Holes

Each year we celebrate peace, but the truth is we are still at war. The bombs fall elsewhere, and closer to home it takes a different shape. With his series Black Holes, Sunyé dives into a violent history in which we subconsiously remain trapped to this day. In these photographs, the line between fairytale and nightmare fades. Now it has been a hundred years since the First World War ended. At the same time thousands of people wash up on Europe’s shores. Millions are on the run. In response populism is reverted to. It’s easy to go along with but even easier to be indignant about it. For when danger and violence lurk, we must find ways to survive. This is someting that touches us all. The question for each of us is, how do I survive, and at the cost of whom? To visualise the relationship between past violence and the human today, Sunyé travelled to ominous places in Europe. Places where restoring nature and time passing by veil the scars of war, hiding them from the eye. However, through the peaceful nature the lingering pain can still be sensed as an incessant tremor in the air. The models in the photographs depict, in relation tot heir surroundings, the ways in which we try to survive in life threatening situations. Ways that keep up us alive in these places, but also keep us trapped; we give up or pretend to be stronger than we truly are, we make ourselves as small as possible, look away or dwell in fantasy, we cover agression with love or hide behind a cold wall, safe but assured of loneliness and cold. Sunyé thus uncovers in an unsettling way the relationship between survival and the continuation of violence.

Photographer

Julien Sunye

Seeking a way out of his deep and long depression, Sunyé familiarises himself with the theme of trauma. He learns that early childhood trauma is burried deep in our subconsious yet defines our present. In a sense, we thus become prisoners of our past.

During the summer of 2016 Sunyé visits the battlefields of Verdun in France and is strikken by the idea that this entanglement with our past doesn’t only play out on an invidiual level but on a societal level too. He finds that the wars we commemorate distract us from the fact that the violence never ended. What do peace and freedom mean when no bombs fall over our heads but inside ourselves we are still trapped?

Sunyé feels at home between the ruins and the silence he finds on the shooting locations he visits between 2016 and 2018. He is soothed by the humming of the engine during thousands of miles he spends on the road traveling for this project. The prospect of another shoot is what keeps him going through these difficult years.

Two years and over 20 photoshoots later, this series of photographs honours those fallen in collective violence as well as those who today are still trapped within themselves and who keep defying the elusive torments of their own past.

This user account status is Approved