N5 / Jonathan Loppin

N5 / Jonathan Loppin

With Sand Memorial, Loppin takes up the two principal kinds of tourism in the region in a manner whose treatment is out of synch with the gravity of the subject matter. In this work he stages a complete, fictitious battle in short skits whose actors appear to be right out of a children’s sandbox. Rifles on their shoulders, the lead soldiers shake hands in a playful match in the midst of sand castles. Far from deriding the heroic actions of soldiers, of which there is a considerable history in Normandy, in this work Jonathan Loppin explores the form itself of the war memorial as a tourist site.