IF THE NORTH WIND Were to Open the DoorArtist’s book by Alain Freixe and Ernest Pignon-Ernest

This poem, of rare intensity, carries us into the heart of the moving story of Samia Yusuf Omar, the young Somali athlete who, in 2008, embodied in her stride the promise of a radiant future at the Beijing Olympic Games.

Alain Freixe’s prose, like a meditation, unveils the tension between the dignity of a dream and the brutality of the female condition in Somalia, where oppression and the absence of freedom weigh heavily.The metaphor of the north wind opening the door evokes the yearning for freedom, for escape, in the face of a fate too often cruel. The sea — at once a symbol of hope and despair — becomes the stage of a silent shipwreck, where life dissolves into black water, swept away by the wave of global indifference to the tragedies of migration.

This prose, imbued with both gentleness and gravity, reminds us that behind every statistic, every sinking, lies a life, a broken dream, a trampled dignity.It invites us to reflect deeply on the condition of women in Somalia, on the world’s indifference to clandestine migration, and on the necessity of not looking away.Through his subtle poetry, Alain Freixe compels us to feel emotion — to hear the breath of those who seek simply to live, to run toward a better future, even if it leads them to death.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest – A Drawn, Pasted, and Haunted Memory

In IF THE NORTH WIND Were to Open the Door, the drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest are far more than a mere visual accompaniment to Alain Freixe’s text; they constitute a poetic substance in their own right, embodied in a profoundly singular visual language.

The artist unfolds a series of six blue pastel drawings, produced with exceptional precision as pigment prints on Awagami Japanese paper, in the workshop of Jean-Yves Noblet.This traditional paper, chosen for its transparency and delicacy, captures with remarkable intensity the precision of the line, the vibration of the shadows, and the sensuous density intrinsic to pastel work.

Yet it is through the mounting on sand, carried out by Bernard Alligand, that the drawings acquire an unprecedented dimension.This artisanal technique, applied to Moulin du Gué 270 g rag paper, redefines the relationship between image and surface, recreating the tactile presence of the walls and places upon which Pignon-Ernest usually installs his figures.A pioneer of contemporary urban art, he here transposes into the book the very materiality of the real: grain, roughness, relief — granting the drawing a three-dimensional, almost sculptural existence.

Some of the mounted drawings are partially torn, in a deliberate and controlled gesture that introduces a tension between fragility and resilience.These tears are not accidents but poetic acts: they evoke fractured memory, missing bodies, erased traces of the world.Each fragment of altered paper becomes a passage, a threshold between presence and disappearance.

Through this unique combination of techniques — pastel, pigment printing, Japanese paper, mounting on sand, shaping through tearing — every copy of the book becomes a one-of-a-kind piece.It is not a reproduction but a sensitive re-creation, where aesthetics meets ethics, where form embodies commitment: to speak, without pathos, of a silent memory — fragile, yet standing.

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