When I discovered the port of Dunkirk, with my feet in the coal mud, I felt as if I were staring at a dark figure from the past, from the time of the Industrial Revolution. I had before me a landscape covered in black molasses and dust, brutal and filthy, transformed to the extreme, a dark and spectacular incarnation of the Anthropocene, this "man era", one of those visions that suggest an imminent collapse, with an almost apocalyptic allure. A hypothetical prospect, but all the same: the scale of the marks on this gigantic site made me perceive the stamp of my fellow creatures on an earthly scale. This is indeed the case: the impact of our activities is such that man is becoming a geological force. We're creating new types of sediment in the future, such as plastiglomerates, a stratum of rock composed largely of microplastics, spread across the entire globe.

The photographic work presented here by Vincent Jendly offers exceptional testimony to an equally remarkable site: the industrial zone of the Grand Port Maritime de Dunkerque in the Nord department. Initiated by the French government in the late 1960s, this area serves as an emblem of national regional planning policies, aimed at modernizing and “rebalancing” France during the economic, urban, and industrial boom of the Trente Glorieuses. This vast complex is dedicated to heavy industry, hosting facilities such as a petrochemical plant, a cement factory, and notably, one of Europe’s largest metallurgical plants

Another novelty for the paleontologists of the future: due to the disappearance of wild megafauna and our impact on species in general, 93% of the biomass of terrestrial vertebrates is already made up of domestic species, led by cows, which satisfy our unreasonable appetites for meat. It's even likely that within three centuries, the cow will become the largest animal on Earth, an almost unbelievable prediction. In the digs of the future, is this what will be left of us? A mantle of black dirt and a veil of cow fossils?