When walking through Le Havre it can’t be missed, 25 murals on the walls of buildings owned by Alceance social housing, association. These so-called frescoes are created by Grégory Chatonsky (1971) a French and Canadian Artist. The murals are based on photos from Le Havre before it was bombed and destroyed during the Second World War.
The murals show baroque landscapes, historical characters and buildings combined with nature like trees and industrial pipes intertwine. They show the effects of pollution and waste on the landscape, the erosion of the earth.
Grégory Chatonsky used AI to create the images, he calles the technique “artificial imagination”. For these murals photographs from the archives at Le Havre are used to recreate an alternative version of the city, showing the past, the present and the future. They want to show what the city could have been, had it not been destroyed in 1944.
During World War II the city center and the port of Le Havre was bombed by the British Royal Airforce in 1944. Plan was to weaken the occupier under Operation Astonia.
After the war the city was quickly rebuild, one of the architects was Auguste Perret. Of course, the city was totally different from before the war.