The ugly dark hulk has a daunting bulk. A grim legacy of the Nazi occupation. The old submarine base still occupies the Bacalan district of Bordeaux. So many tons of concrete – 600,000 cubic metres of them – would be difficult to remove.
But walk round it and there’s a surprising softening in an imaginative reclaiming of wasteland. Winding borders of flowers – blue, pink, purple, white – and waving grasses invite butterflies, bees and birds to feed and the wildlife happily obliges. Why not? Plant it right and they will come.
It’s a cheering sight on a grey afternoon and not the only one on our two-week train trip through France. We follow the path through flowers curious to see what’s inside the German U-boat bunker built in 1941 by enforced prisoner-of-war labour within convenient striking reach of the British enemy and its supply ships. Inside, an exhibition documents brutal cruelties: enslaved workers, mass deportation, towns bombed to rubble (sound familiar?). Yet, our visit to the Bassins des Lumieres turns out to be a reason for sustaining hope in our own dark time.
We might have joined the queue for the Egypt of the Pharaohs light show across the courtyard but opted instead for the open door to a cavernous darkness lit mainly by photographs and videos. In the first hall, life in pre-war Bordeaux. The wartime stories in the next hall are not easy viewing. Yet there is something wonderful in an exhibition space that transforms what would be a monument to tyranny into a space of enlightenment, ‘the largest digital arts centre in the world.’
We must not forget what populist nationalism can lead to. And there’s much I do not know about that history – this exhibition remembers the thousands of Spanish Republican prisoners of war forced to work in the Nazi slave labour camps. A colour-coded map shows the extent of Third Reich domination across Europe: concentration and extermination camps, ghettos, deportation routes, torture, massacres…
There’s more than one way to be a patriot
On the way out I spot trees beginning to sprout from cracks in the roof of the concrete. In time unchecked nature could reclaim this extraordinary building. The interweaving of mice and men, plants and people, past and present, becomes a theme of our travels. The exhibitions we choose or stumble upon seem to follow a trail: the marks we humans make on the landscape and (what’s left of) the natural world.
Self-selected of course, our visits to museums and galleries reflect our interests. But it’s good to see so many young families with children exploring the Museum of Contemporary Art. The beautiful 19th century warehouse presents the work of 30 artists from here and there, confronting the overlapping crises of here and now. In The Practice of Everyday Life they seek alternatives to waste and destruction, climate change, chaos and corruption.
Hence the collage made from old toothbrushes, bottle tops and sundry other plastics, the video elegy to protests and occupations that hoped to change the world, the bike bearing a sign illuminated in red, “There’s more than one way to be a patriot”, and from disaster an upliftingly childlike series of installations beating drums with drops of water – inspired by the Japanese emergency measures to capture water dripping into the Tokyo metro after the earthquake: upturned umbrellas, buckets, children’s wellies, whatever they could lay hands on.
The museum website explains how the warehouse, built cathedral-like to store colonial spoils – cotton, sugar, cocoa – 200 years ago, has become what American writer bell hooks described as ‘A space of encouragement.’
Are we Homo sapiens or Homo migrans?
The question faces us in the basement of the Museum of Natural History in Bordeaux’s tranquil Jardin Public. It’s true, Ray and I have travelled a long way to get to this point, from Edinburgh Waverley to Bordeaux via Paris. By LNER, Eurostar, TGV. And despite my (yes, hypocritical) tendency to split travelling from tourism we are all part of one huge ‘madding crowd’.
The exhibition, Life in Migration – ‘a fundamental characteristic of the human species’ – pulls no punches. (in French or English)
“We were all immigrants once upon a time…and ‘native’ populations are merely descended from ancestors who arrived earlier.”
Whether we are seeking new lives, fleeing wars, famine, catastrophe, we are constantly on the move and in our wake follow mass movements of plants and animals. We are the great disruptors. The exhibition asks, “Should Homo sapiens better be called Homo migrans?”
Upstairs, we learn how humans drive animal movement. It’s a triumph of taxidermy. Birds, animals, reptiles – great and small – are testimony to the beauty and endless diversity of the creatures we share earth, sea and sky with. Well, of course, we don’t share. Many specimens represent extinct or threatened species.
It is an amazing display of human skill and the ceaseless pursuit of knowledge – fur and feathers beautifully preserved, animals and birds frozen in fight or flight, or foraging for food. In one room the scene is overlooked by a thoughtful giraffe. A stuffed giraffe, for goodness sake. What human skill and patience that demands. The notes in glass cases describe it all, the changing techniques of taxidermy, the evolution of evolutionary study and attitudes to conservation. But the museum makes it clear:
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning, and to that extent Man only meets himself.” Werner Heisenberg Physics and Philosophy 1958.
I’m remembering EO Wilson’s letter to the future in The Future of Life first published in 2002. “Accept our apologies and this audiovisual library that illustrates the wondrous world that used to be.”
Yet here in another glass case is a quote from Chateaubriand about plants, “their seed is their posterity…sent out to populate new regions.”
Back at Bacalan flowers bloom and grasses wave, spilling and spreading their seed with the help of birds and bees. I don’t think you can call this ‘rewilding’. These borders are carefully planned and planted yet they bring new life and colour to lift the heart.
And there is the hope.
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