Nothing is more like a military parade than another military parade. But if the viewer takes three steps back and the famous sites of Lourdes appear in the background: the basilica of Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire, the sanctuary of Notre-Dame and the Massabielle cave, where the young Bernadette Soubirous is said to have met the Virgin Mary in 1858, that is another question. A case that photographer Anna Prokulevich, who has lived in France for about ten years, wanted to explore.
The young Belarusian, 27 years old, discovered the Marian city of the Hautes Pyrenees by chance in 2019, during the premiere on the screens of Lourdes, Documentary film by Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai, dedicated to this very special municipality, its pilgrimages and its multitude of sick people who come there in the hope of being cured. She discovers, astonished, that the city attracts more than three million people each year and that seventy miracles have occurred to date, according to the official count of the Church. It especially scares him to see uniforms in the crowd.
“These images resonate with my spiritual search, my pacifist convictions, my sensitivity to the events that shake the world and with the weight of current events that I sometimes find very heavy.” she explains. His curiosity was heightened and he decided to start working on the relationship between war and religion. In the spring of 2022, he goes out to observe this phenomenon in situ, without preconceived ideas. “I had a little camera with me, just to save memories.” she said.
“Hit” From the number of uniforms on the streets of Lourdes, he learned that an international military pilgrimage takes place here every year in May, which has been taking place since the end of the Second World War. For three days, soldiers from more than fifty countries meet there with the objective, according to the diocese of the French armies, of“working to bring the Mercy of God to the military world and support the wounded”. On this scale, this meeting is unique in the world.
A “strange and paradoxical” place
In 2023 and then 2024, Anna Prokulevich returns, this time simply armed with her Mamiya 645. She wants to understand what those whom Pope John Paul II called the “sentinels of peace”… Although he does not have accreditation, the army guarantees him to be able to work freely in public spaces. Then adopt the “snake position” a method that I practiced when I was little, and which consists of “to approach someone without ever attacking, being close and distant at the same time”.
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