Shelter

Saint-Viance, april 2010.

« Pupils shelter ». Why does this sounds weird? Partly because we all call it a bus shelter, of course. But also because it’s quite rare to find such a precision in a public space. Usually, the « pupils » category is used in more specialized places or times. Within schools obviously, where it helps to distinguish people, their rights and their duties. We also hear about it in September, a week or two during which we become aware of their existence, their anxieties, their number-per-classes, those sorts of things. But when october comes, we forget about them; just dealing, for some of us, with our own children.
Actually, this is the force of this unusually qualified shelter: rather than drawing sheer distinctions, rather than inscribing the frontiers of a dedicated space, it brings to presence the existence of pupils, in the middle of the month of April, while I walk before it. Their life made of friendships, of exams, of betrayals, of plans, of romances, of parents. A life made of bus rides. A life haunted by my own past and that of the girl who used to catch the bus here every day thirty years ago.