Amicale

The Amicale dedicates next week (February 19 to 23) to Ukraine, to commemorate the tragic date of February 24, 2022, the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

An exhibition entitled “DAWN, children of Ukraine” will be presented from February 19 to 23 at the PACE Hemicycle Foyer. Children are massively affected by this war of aggression, many have lost their homes, have endured or are still enduring a brutal occupation. The Franco-Ukrainian photographer Youry Bilak dedicated his new series DAWN to these children. The exhibition evokes the unspeakable that scars their young years, and speaks for all those absent, the others, by the hundreds of thousands, exiled, deported, injured, deceased.

The Amicale invites you to its inauguration on February 19 at 5 p.m., in the presence (in particular) of the President of the Delegates, the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, the Permanent Representative of France and the photographer. The exhibition contains 23 photographs of children taken after February 24, 2022 in several cities in Ukraine: Boutcha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodyanka, Chernihiv, Vinnytsia… Each photograph is commented on by a text explaining the life of the child and his family before the arrival of the invader then the ordeal and trauma caused by the war.

In addition, a charity sale of pancakes by the Ukrainian section of the Amicale will take place on Friday February 23 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Agora, the Human Rights Palace and the Palais de l'Europe (bar des 12 stars).

Finally, this same Friday, February 23, at 5 pm at Kléber Bookshop, the Amicale will receive the Franco-Bosnian writer Velibor Colic, for a meeting around his latest novel "War and Rain", a story that is both hallucinatory and funny, which has as a backdrop the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The description of this universe of fear, where no law exists, where a soldier can throw a grenade under a cow for a laugh, where another can stealing an old man's breathing apparatus to resell it, is tempered by the marvellous sweetness of memories from before - in particular loving memories, evoked with a delicacy and poetry which captivate. A great book, in which the echo of the war in Ukraine resonates terribly today.