The Factory

Marie Galante hangs on the chaotic rhythm of its old sugar factory, Grand Anse. It is a cathedral of rusty iron living on borrowed time for 30 years.

Here the past resurfaces, in the unchanged gestures of the labour, the endurance that it requires, the claimed attachment to its harshness.

In Marie Galante, the cane still shapes men’s destinies, and sugar is still made with their sweat and the clatter of machines.

It’s a singular spectacle, that of work in Grand Anse: a vertiginous plunge back in time, to the dawn of the industrial era, and even further back, as this struggle has been going on for centuries.