Zone Rouge / Red Zone (Back Forest Reflections)
For the first of a series of posts about my latest film-poem project, I am sharing a short reflection by the commissioner of the work, Dr. Esther Breithoff (Birkbeck, University Of London). Esther is the Principal Investigator on the research project, Ecologies of Violence.
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| Still from 'Zone Rouge' |
Ecologies of Violence uses archaeological, historical and ethnographic research as well as vitalist/‘more-than-human’ frameworks to critically investigate how landscapes remember past violence against both culture and nature, and how these social, material and biological scars persist in...
Shared text:
Reflecting on Collaboration
The Vimy red zone forest looks ordinary at first: trees rising, leaves shifting, a canopy of green. Yet beneath the roots, traces of a violent past persist - collapsed tunnels, rusting shells, toxins seeping into the soil. It is a forest growing out of wounds that never closed.
Lyons’ film-poem moves differently. Instead of measuring, it lingers. Instead of mapping, it listens. It attends to atmospheres and remnants, drawing out what cannot be captured in data alone. Light bends through reflective glass, shadows deepen in infrared, the surface of leaves and bark gleams under altered vision. Hidden microphones stretch into the hushed layers of the forest, catching what usually slips away: the whisper of wind through hollow spaces, the soft steps of deer, the low hum of insects in the undergrowth. Out of these fragments emerges a forest of echoes that seems dreamlike, haunted and alive.
What the film discloses is not only what can be seen but what is felt: the persistence of memory, the reverberations of loss, the quiet insistence of renewal. It reminds us that no matter how precise, research and data alone cannot fully understand a place such as Vimy Ridge. While scans, maps and datasets chart the terrain in measurable form, the film gestures to what lies beyond the grid: atmospheres, silences, presences that exceed capture. In this way, the film-poem does not stand apart from research but reframes it. It allows data to be seen differently, not as a fixed truth, but as one strand within a more entangled vision. It opens space for uncertainty, atmosphere and more-than-human presence. It makes the forest legible not only as an archive of violence, but as a living participant in cycles of trauma and renewal. Through its textures and rhythms, the film reveals the red zone as more than a relic of violence or a hazard to be managed. It appears instead as a shifting ecology of memory and resilience, a place where war’s afterlives remain palpable and where life continues to press through the cracks of destruction.
And while rooted in Vimy, the film’s resonance stretches outward. Across the world, other red zones continue to carry the weight of conflict, from Laos to the Korean Demilitarized Zone to Palestine and the Ukraine. They are landscapes of involuntary heritage: inheritances of violence that persist in soil, water and air, forcing humans and more-than-humans to adapt, endure and sometimes flourish.
Esther Breithoff, 2025
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| Still Image |
“The ‘Red Zone’ is a liminal and atmospheric setting. To creatively encounter and record such a place, I selected some experimental visual techniques including: infra-red filming; use of reflective glass/mirrors for double-images; vintage camera lenses with distinctive visual characteristics. Most of my visual effects were analog, optical or ‘in-camera’; with no digital special effects. Also, I used specialist microphones to extend beyond our human perceptions. The forest, the landscape, is alive, with a rhythm and pulse. Some of this can be accessed via contact microphones and other techniques.
The soundtrack elements (voices, sound-effects, natural sounds, music, song) are the primary means I’ve used to orient and contextualise the film. The process included the emergence of metaphorical imagery and sounds, interweaving and binding the film e.g. Maple and Beech leaves, Craneflies, Wren birdsong. These are real, but also symbolic and alchemical. Important too was the allée or Beech avenue which forms the backbone of the forest exclusion area. One of my intentions here is to emphasise renewed ‘covering over’ (re-covery) by plants (the power of photosynthesis), as occurs in lands which have had their vegetation layer removed e.g. by mining, agriculture or warfare. Surviving with, and adapting to, toxic legacies is a challenge - for entangled human and non-human ecologies.”
Antony Lyons, 2025
"Nous avons eu le privilège d’assister à la première de l’exposition Ecologies of Violence à Vimy, et nous tenons à vous remercier pour ce moment suspendu que vous nous avez offert.
Dès les premières images de votre œuvre, une atmosphère envoûtante s’est installée. Le site de Vimy, si chargé d’histoire, est devenu sous votre regard et sa bande son un espace de contemplation, de poésie, presque de guérison.
La musique, les paroles, les chants d’oiseaux, les craquements des troncs… tout semblait nous parler doucement, comme un souffle venu du passé qui murmure encore dans la forêt.
On aurait dit un conte – ou mieux, une ode. Une ode à la nature, résiliente, silencieuse mais vivante. Une nature qui, malgré les blessures chimiques et les cicatrices encore visibles, reprend peu à peu ses droits.
Cette œuvre nous a procuré une sensation rare : celle d’un apaisement profond.
On en ressort plus calme, plus attentif, plus connecté à la terre… et à l’histoire.
Merci pour cette création qui lie le sensible à la mémoire."
Anne et Fabrice Dubuc, Association des Amis du Monument Canadien de Vimy
A SHORT TRAILER CAN BE SEEN AT: https://vimeo.com/1080241787
