The Fallen 9000 was an artistic ‘event’ to coincide and mark International Peace day on 21st September. The project took place on the D-Day landing beach of Arromanches in France with the objective of representing the estimated 9,000 civilians, German forces and Allies who lost their lives on 6th June 1944.
The project was the idea of Yorkshire sand artistis, Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss. They created a series of stencilled drawings for a team of volunteers to use to create the image prints of bodies in the sand.
Our challenge is to represent those lives lost between the times of the tide with a stark visual representation using stencilled sand drawings of people on the beach. Each silhouette represents a life and when it is washed away its loss. There is no distinction between nationalities, they will only be known as ‘The Fallen’.
As the authors describe, “the exact figure of the fatalities will never be known due to the horrendous carnage that is often termed the ‘fog’ of war. 9000 is a rounded down to the nearest thousand and is most likely a conservative number based on 3000 French civilians, 2000 German Forces and 4414 Allies.”
You can read more about the project here and also see the full gallery of photos and images emerging from this event here.