Everything is based on this unsolvable conflict. Nature, beloved or looted, has an irrelevant background to the story. The taiga appears as "a pure Western ghost", says the director, because even in the boundless spaces freedom remains a utopia. The images are wrapped in a twilight atmosphere, the indefinite light in which everything seems immersed, testifies to the imminence of a disappearance, something fleeing towards the darkness.
And unfortunately there is no way out. The history of Braguino confirms what goes through the whole history of the West: the umpteenth thematicization of the use of force for the conquest and conservation of power. Here too, violence has its own cultural elaboration, which evolves by constructing codes, which in turn produce another kind of order: from an impossible absence of rules to a form of selfishness, cultured in its most cruel and predatory dimension. Slowly a certainty emerges: no human behavior can claim to be exhaustive of its humanity. The Kilines because they contribute to annihilating the Braguine and these because they are not able to establish a relationship.

Only in two moments there seems to be a possibility. The first is bear hunting. Sacha Braguine runs safely through the forest. He takes a shotgun and shoots a bear without hesitation. Then he pulls out a knife with which he dismember it and deposits the animal's snout on the trunk of a tree. "We pray for him and then bury him," he says to his son. He makes a gesture of gratitude. It returns a part of nourishment to the earth that has allowed it to feed itself. Now the forest is no longer a pure geographical space, just as every accomplished gesture is a symbolic act, since it contains the memory of a foundational myth, namely the original choice of abandoning "civilization". Shortly after killing the bear, Sacha Braguine breathes in the barrel of her rifle in the direction of the trees, plays it like an instrument and then returns to the air what previously has been taken with the fire: a breath of life.

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The island of children is the other place where the possibility of coexistence could emerge. In the middle of the river there is a sandy area that does not belong to anyone, where the children of both families play in total autonomy. It seems that their bodies are impregnated by the wind, the smell of the taiga, the freshness of the forest. For a moment it seems they can break the dynamics of the adult world. Yet, in the middle of this miniature space, no change takes place. Children do not speak. They spy, they control, but they do not communicate. They are silent witnesses to the conflict. The only place destined for socialization becomes the umpteenth space of constraint, almost the space of a burial. Like nature, they undergo the domination of the adult world.

The images confirm it. They travel and accumulate various moments of life beneath their surface, connecting moments distant from each other. The dream of the beginning is premonitory. It is possible to glimpse the future in it: the siege, the fear, the escape. The document has given way to the story, the realism to the staging. The impression is that the silence of the forest will not resist the poachers' bombs. The infinite calm of the plain, the misty sky, the sleeping of the great river mark the end of a world. Braguino is little more than this, a point that becomes visible, intensifies and merges with the movement of an impossible time. And, conversely, this time manifests itself in space. A chronotope would say Michail Bachtin, "center of concretization and representational incarnation", even if unfortunately it is a void, given by a system of relationships that produces only impoverishment and inequality.
Finally a question arises: what role do images have? Can they fill this gap? It would seem a utopia. Watching the pain of others has never changed the destinies of man, from Auschwitz to Syria. He only showed impotence in the face of this condition.

In Cogitore's case, observing and showing the suffering and fear of others does not lead to real disapproval and neither to empathic compassion. Even the anesthetizing and aesthetic effect of which Susan Sontag spoke does not materialize. The images of Cogitore are not full of visual virtuosity. Nature is not sublime and man is distant from the purity of a hypothetical Edenic condition. His images are problematic because they are placed a moment before the destruction, the "ritual syntax" of violence is only made it be intuited. They do not spectacularise pain, do not produce voyeuristic effects and do not trigger mimetic processes. Rather, they show the story that each of us knows to perfection, but which represented into an out-of-the-ordinary context: if we can not change the relationships between us and our fellow human beings and, at the same time, we will not give up our essentially anthropocentric vision, we will do nothing but press the self-destruction process of nature and man.
The images for Cogitore have the function of resisting nothingness. These are the silent traces of a world that no longer exists. However, he states that the photographs are not closed in on themselves, but appear as "luminous documents, great fireflies in the darkness". What then remains in our eyes: the reflection of an elusive world that fights against its disappearance or that of a chilling truth that is threatening on our future?

Exhibition: Clément Cogitore, Braguino ou la communauté impossible, curated by Diane Dufour et Léa Bismuth.
Installation realised by LE BAL for LE BAL de la Jeune Création award with ADAGP.