The construction of the Via Domitia began 1900 years ago. In the south of France, the country was then named Braccata, after the "braies" worn by the Gauls, unlike the toga-wearing Romans. The Romans invaders erased names and memories. This road, built upon the ancient Gallic paths, was a key element for penetrating and conquering what was then a Wild west, a road traced by the enemy to subdue and dominate. From the Alps to the Pyrenees, this open trail preserves the unintelligible whispers of a vanished time.
Roads don't want to die. Over 700 kilometers long, the Via is still a major geographical, economic and cultural marker for the regions it crosses. It remains in the landscape in various forms: a freeway, a dirt track, a hedge... It is often on maps that its memory appears, a straight line, a gash in the land like the memory of an old wound. Over the last twenty centuries, it has not been spared by the fluctuations of land use planning, and you can't protect a road like you would a cathedral.
Legends and history mingle: Hannibal and his elephants, Hercules, Julius Caesar, Napoleon. A road of pilgrims and beggars, of exodus during the Spanish Civil War. It remains a major axis in the South of France, the road having inspired, consciously or not, the builders of freeways and railroads to the point of absorbing the thousand-year-old itinerary. But this symmetry is also a threat to the remains of the track.
This "topographical memory" has shaped the landscape as the oldest geographical marker still visible. Yet it has never been the subject of any major enhancement projects. It tells us a story of movement, people and their hold on their environment. It is neither a place or a site, but has been shaping the territory around it for almost two millennium. If walls make cities, it is roads that make territories. A relationship between memory and landscape, because the landscape experience is special in that it concentrates, in the instant of perception, echoes of the past and projections into the future. Through this project, I propose to draw up a color chart of this protean space. Capturing not the most spectacular monuments and landscapes, but rather the surges of memory in this hollow space around which history has coalesced. I set off in search of the traces of this "Latin arc" that, from one mountain to the next, carries with it the idea of cohesion.