Philippe Forest and Olivier Menanteau Document Life at Les Acacias

A commission from the Fondation de France sent writer Philippe Forest and photographer Olivier Menanteau to spend a year documenting the lives of autistic adults at Les Acacias, a pavilion within a hospital near Paris that had been housing them for over a decade. Forest, known for his book L'Enfant éternel, was chosen not only for his literary talent but because he had personally faced illness and death, allowing him to approach the irreducible mystery of inner confinement. He writes as both a reporter on the front of a strange, immobile war and as a novelist, attempting to give voice and soul to a block of silence. Menanteau's photographs similarly avoid voyeurism. The text includes a lucid explanation by Forest in its final pages.