Over the past fifteen years, as he has been unearthing his grandfather’s photographic treasures, Michel Lecat has discovered hundreds of portraits of these Vietnamese workers who, whenever they had a spare moment, would visit the BONDIER Frères optical and photography shop. Michel’s grandfather would lend them a suit, which they would pass around among themselves. In front of Robert Bondier’s lens, these “natives” regained their dignity as free men.
Michel Lecat then came up with the idea for this memorial.
From these hundreds of photographs, he extracted 1,200 faces, all of which were anonymous. We chose two of the most expressive ones. We used computer software to recreate these two faces using the 1,200 faces of their classmates.
These two mosaic portraits were reproduced on ceramic tiles measuring 2.5 meters by 3.5 meters using digital printing by the company “Photocéramique Concept” in Larée (Gers). Six portraits of Vietnamese people are printed on each tile. At the same time, each tile constitutes a pixel of one of the two immense portraits. Each of the two giant portraits is therefore composed of 1,200 faces of his former comrades.
In 2023, when Michel and I met Frédéric Delmarès, the mayor of Creysse, he immediately agreed to host our project for a memorial to the Indochinese workers of the Dordogne in his town.
In the meantime, we had received some very valuable advice from Cindy Levan, a structural engineer—and the granddaughter of an Indochinese laborer who had passed through Bergerac: above all, don’t attach these tiles directly to the wall (where they might not hold up over the long term), but instead attach them to panels designed for that purpose!
In the spring of 2026, technical staff began carefully installing these tiles on the wall of the beautiful town hall in Creysse, near one of the camps where Indochinese workers were interned 80 years ago.
The memorial was dedicated on May 30, 2026, in the presence of His Excellency Mr. TRINH Duc Hai, Vietnam’s ambassador to France, as well as Frédéric Delmarès, mayor of Creysse; Mr. Fabien Ruet, mayor of Bergerac; and representatives of local government bodies (CAB, department, region).
My Remarks at the Inauguration
Michel Lecat's remarks