‘They took my liberty, our liberty’
If life is made of memories, then horror runs on a loop.
It was eight months after the murders that Natacha Panot returned fully to life again. Once she started creating, she couldn’t stop.
The French artist and sculptor has returned to New Zealand, her home ‘‘in my heart’’, almost two years after surviving the 2015 Paris terror attack that killed at least 130 people. She brought art with her – reclaiming her liberty.
On November 13, 2015, Panot froze on the street outside her local cafe, Le Petit Cambodge, as terrorists sprayed the crowds with bullets. A bullet, or shrapnel, grazed her neck.
Fifteen people died between Le Petit Cambodge and the nearby Carillon bar. The memories were unshakeable in the months afterwards.
‘‘Everything was 13th November. Everything, all the time, looping, looping.’’
On November 13, 2015, Panot was happy. It was a pleasant Friday night in Paris and she had just been at a friend’s exhibition before strolling to Le Petit Cambodge to eat.
The attack sounded like fireworks, at first. Then she turned and saw horror. ‘‘There were a lot of people on the ground, and masses of people, and there was no sound at all from the voice of people, just the sound whatever it was, of the blasting of bullets.’’
She froze and it was only a woman screaming a man’s name, ‘‘Pierre’’, to an unmoving person, belly-down on the ground, that snapped her out of it.
Panot sheltered behind a car. ‘‘This woman, thank God she screamed,’’ she said.
It was eight months before Panot could pick up a lump of clay.
‘‘I was really stressed, because I had ideas but I couldn’t touch anything. The movement of doing it was dead. I was not capable physically of holding, doing, creating.’’
Panot has created an exhibition, Body Shape(s), Sharp, Sharpening Over, running until August 27 at Wellington’s Three Eyes gallery – a textural feast examining the female form, and part of her body of work after recovering from the attacks.
‘‘They took my liberty, our liberty. That’s what they stole. They stole it from us ... speech, movement, everything.’’