Le Havre — in spite of having the second most important port in France — is one of the most boring and decadent places on earth. But I love it, I spent one of the best years of my life there. That’s why watching artist JR make something beautiful in Le Havre makes me both happy and nostalgic.
This piece is part of the project Women Are Heros. He used 2600 sheets of paper and pasted them into the ship containers to form the image. The ship will go all the way from Le Havre to Malaysia.
This video is an excerpt from Rivages, by director Guillaume Cagniard. He writes:
I wanted to show through the portraits of dockers an example of a profession embodied by proud and solitary men. Deeply rooted in traditional values, passed on from father to son, these dockers challenge the constant coming and going of ships. I wanted to pay tribute to the various trades in the port, without which JR’s project would not have been possible.
The port is a very secluded place, closed off by barriers, without any women. One can only become a docker strictly through father-son legacies. That is what I wanted to show with the three generations of dockers stacked on top of each other, watching the boat drift away.