No memory should ever fade.

The spark, in the heart of the Artois hills

It all began with something deeply personal: a need to pay my respects at my grandparents’ grave in Houdain cemetery. But once I was there, the reality on the ground caught up with me. Faced with a vast site, laid out on a difficult hillside, with no clear plan to hand and unsettled by the constant extension of the grounds, my own bearings and my memory wavered.

It was out of that frustration and that sense of loss that the idea of REQUIEM-Memory was born: no memory should fade because of a geographical barrier or a lack of tools. It became vital to create a guide, an indestructible bridge between the physical world and digital memory.

Watching time go by

The idea made its way, fed by my regular walks through the fields and military cemeteries of our region. Looking at the Commonwealth graves, one detail struck me deeply: families leave messages, small framed photographs, tributes on laminated sheets. But exposed to the weather, these testimonies inevitably end up fading and disappearing.

That is where the project matured. In my notebooks, on sheets of paper, the ideas piled up: it was not enough to locate, it was necessary to preserve, to pass on, and to offer an everlasting setting for these civilian and military tributes.

The great challenge of a lifetime: from the Commodore 64 to the Concours Lépine

To bring this vision to life, it had to be built. Self-taught and passionate about computing since my teens and my first lines of code on a Commodore 64, I forged my rigour over a many-sided career, ending it as an industrial maintenance engineer.

A serious accident in 2013 cut that professional path short, but it did not dent my resilience. Drawing on that experience and on that urgency to pass things on, I threw myself into this final technological and human adventure.

This project, born of an impossible search along the paths of Houdain cemetery, found its finest recognition in Paris. REQUIEM-Memory is now ready to watch over your memories.