“It was thanks to the little lead soldiers of the First Empire that belonged to my father, and to Jean-Paul Kauffmann's travel account The Dark Room of Longwood, that I went to Saint Helena. Having always been strongly drawn to islands, I decided to take an interest in this rock in the middle of the South Atlantic and to record the landscapes of the Napoleonic exile, continuing in this way to build a personal archipelago of my own.” — Marcel Fortini