The Sundays, since my childhood, I like to walk the night in this deserted shipbuilding yard, dreaming that spaceships in departure was surrounding me.

In fact, the reality is not far from the fiction. The conquest of the oceans is similar to the dreams of space conquest. Crossing the Atlantic to join the new world was an adventure as perilous than travelling threw the space-opera's interstellar dimensions. .

Founded by Colbert into 1664, the powerful "Compagnie des Indes" build in Lorient in 1719 its principal base of freighting and shipbuilding.
Here were built and armed the fleets which crossed the ocean, for the trade of spices, silk, rice, cotton, tea, porcelain, salpetre, coffee but also, slaves.

During the world war II, the German army build there a powerful submarine base, now unused, the raison why the town was completly destroyed by the allied bombardments.

The giants bunkers with a gothic profile, builded to protect the warships from the air raids, were preserved from the flood of fire which destroys the city.

Always in activity, the slipway of longitudinal type is a magic place generating dreams.

Damaged or made rough by the ocean, which reduces its hydrodynamism, the hull must be cleaned and repainted at least every two years. For this operation, the boat is tow out of the water.

The ship came out perpendicular to the shore. In order to prevent that it does not break, when the prow emerges whereas the poop still floats, it is tractor drawn on carriages provided with wood chocks out which support the hull.

The carriages, travelling on a railway, are then acicular towards the various zones of careenage by an enormous mobile pontoon embedded in a vast and dirty concrete arena.

The tests of painting, on the walls of the blockhouses, draw abstract camaieu frescos of Ochre, Sienne and Outremer.

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Metaphor of future stellar armadas , or, post-apocalyptic amphitheatre of a declining Rome, the slipway is a place spontaneously metamorphosed in dreamer's spirit.

As Tristan, the adolescent hero of my novel, I often refuge myself, at night, at the end of a broken pontoon in the entry of the port. I listened to the stranges laughts of the gulls, which accompanied, by their hystericals clouds, the trawlers's return.

Dominating the "criée of its disaster blind frontage, the threatening mass of the refrigerator confers to this part of the port a dramatic atmosphere of world end.

Mixed with the machines's remugles of brine and grease, old subtle forces, but almost palpable, impregnate this labyrinth of concrete and rusted steel.