Blackthorne

EDITION

2025, Winner

school

Ecole nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière, Paris, France

links

@lilian.heliot ↗

Once lining the embankments of the French countryside, hedgerows dominated the landscape before the sweeping land consolidation that followed World War II. In the post-war years, hedges were uprooted and embankments flattened to merge agricultural plots. The French state launched vast consolidation campaigns across the country, orchestrated by rural engineering departments. Bulldozers soon gave way to tractors, promising increased productivity. The countryside was brought into line. Between 1950 and today, nearly 70% of the hedgerow network has vanished—amounting to around 1.55 million kilometers lost. This project focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, the most intense and contested period of land consolidation in Brittany, and extends into a visual exploration of the bocage landscape of the Côtes-d’Armor. Built on collected testimonies and archival research, the work weaves together photographs, documents, and film captured across the region. More than a technical redrawing of property lines, land consolidation triggered a radical transformation of rural life. This silent revolution—often recounted without acknowledging its violence or the many forms of resistance it provoked—played a pivotal role in shaping the modern agricultural world. By creating a dialogue between past and present through image, Blackthorn seeks to challenge a linear and sanitized reading of time. Revisiting this erased memory opens up possible paths toward justice, and pushes back against the tabula rasa that took place in both the landscape and collective memory.