Food, Glorious Food

I was recently invited to a preview visit of the Camp des Milles, a huge former brick factory just outside Aix en Provence which was used as an internment camp at the beginning of the Second World War and opens to the public as a memorial early next month. Over 10,000 people were locked up here: political dissidents, "enemy aliens", artists, intellectuals and Jews - sometimes all five categories at once. Visiting the camp could have been depressing, but in fact it's thought-provoking and, in a strange way, inspiring - mainly because the artists holed up there found extraordinary ways of transforming their experience. On near-starvation rations, they covered all the walls of one room with surreal frescoes celebrating a superabundance of food.... Click here to read more