2023-04-30 06:00:31
The paint stain fills the entire sheet. It could represent a country under smoke, with yellow and blue colors escaping from it. Unless this invasive form represents a mental space, saturated with pain. At the bottom of the sheet, small hearts surround the first name Ostap, the ten-year-old author of the drawing, like a magic garland that would come to his aid.
This drawing made in a refugee camp in Lviv, in July 2022, in Ukraine, was collected by Triangle Generation Humanitaire, an NGO in Lyon which has been working in combat zones for thirty years. Then it was entrusted to Zérane S. Girardeau, 54, a former human resources executive, who has made it her mission to save the drawings of children caught up in armed conflicts. The precious document from Ukraine has joined “Explosions”, the exhibition of 140 drawings from 35 different countries, presented at the International Museum of the Reform, in Geneva (Switzerland), until August 27.
More than an exhibition, “Déflagrations” is a corpus in motion, made up of hundreds of drawings collected over the past ten years. Found in camps, entrusted by families or associations, transmitted by war reporters or organizations such as Unicef, the drawings are passed from hand to hand thanks to a network of good souls. “These drawings came to me through chance encounters, as if an informal collective had decided to take care of them. Sometimes, the little sheet comes from very far away, crossing borders thanks to NGOs, when it was going to go in the trash, ” explains Zérane S. Girardeau.
“Give voice to those who have none”
In her small office at the Maison des Métallos in Paris, she spends her days and evenings contacting her friends in NGOs. After studying at a business school, Zérane S. Girardeau worked for a long time in transport, before being spotted by headhunters to join a human resources department in a company responsible for restructuring businesses. Disagreeing with his methods, she radically changed universe, preferring “to give a voice to those who have none”.
Involved in cultural activities, she contributed in 2007 to “Cris silent”, thirty years of photos on the homeless in Paris, with the Abbé Pierre Foundation. She then participated in 2009 in Avignon in “47, portraits of insurgents”, on the repression of the uprising in Madagascar in 1947. Here she is now curator of a permanent exhibition, tracking archives from around the world. “When a child’s drawing arrives, it is placed on tissue paper, framed. Those little pencil lines, which no one cared about, take on a new life, another journey. They change status, she smiled.
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