Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen
ARTIST / FILMMAKER

 Memorial Series 

(2012)
Lambda c-type print, 101cm x 72cm

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In March 2012 — one year after completing my film, shot in Calais,  Promised Land — I returned to photograph the hideouts and makeshift camps where migrants had lived while trying to reach the UK.

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Revisiting these sites was disturbing, almost apocalyptic. The camps were abandoned. Tarpaulins torn. Belongings scattered. At the same time, their emptiness allowed for another reading: that the people who had once stayed there had moved on, perhaps even reached the destinations they had risked their lives to find.

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Rather than photographing the camps in a quick press-photo style, I chose to light the scenes carefully, as if they were staged images. When entering the camps, I felt an eerie presence — as though the absence itself was charged. To articulate that feeling, I gathered blankets and sleeping bags into central bundles within the frame, suggesting that someone might still be there.

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Each photograph is titled in remembrance of someone who appeared in Promised Land, or someone I came to know during the making of the film — people whose destinies remain unknown.