Sensitive surfaces | Frances Dal Chele

Sensitive surfaces

Belonging. Being intimately persuaded of belonging to a place. Feeling that this place inhabits you more than you inhabit it.

Belonging is not my story. My story is being the daughter of Italian immigrants to the United States and then becoming an immigrant myself to Paris. Rather than a feeling of belonging, my story is feeling a “foreigner”, already as a little girl, and later, uprooting myself voluntarily (then again, my roots were not so deep…).
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I would have wanted to discover Bonifacio from the sea, like Ulysses, penetrating into its natural straits and gliding past its fabulous chalk-white cliffs. Alas, the ferry bringing us back to Corsica only went as far as Bastia. In returning to Bonifacio, the two worlds from which I issued became apparent to me: granddaughter, on my Father’s side, of a large fishing family, and on my Mother’s side, of a family of investors.

My parents’ “home”, which I’d name “Solea” once it became my turn to live there, evokes for me the beginning of papa’s serenity, and Mama’s as well. I can still see my parents in their home, close to 6 p.m., tired out by a hard day’s work, drinking tea, eating peanuts, chatting together, quietly happy.

My Father, ever the untiring builder, undertook constructing a cliff-hanging, spacious home, the work of a lifetime, an affirmation of life, a combat against nature and the elements. Le Ponant would be erected at the far-end of an isolated and practically inaccessible plot of land.

Le Ponant would truly be papa’s “master work”. Every day Papa worked resolutely, with single-minded determination and a singular notion of liberty. For instance, he refused to mix a large quantity of cement in order not to have to be obliged to finish it. Surprising thing, in my eyes.

The life I’ve led has continuously left its mark on the Ile du Levant, as the island has left its mark on me. I found it intolerable to have a hotel above the sea but with no way for boats to disembark my clients. Thus was born the idea of a pontoon-like short quay. Extremely pretentious of me for compared to an unchained sea, man’s creations are of little consequence… Mistral windstorms and voilà, the first two quays dispersed in the Mediterranean or sunk after only one week. Third year, third quay… which has resisted the sea’s repeated onslaughts for four years now. Tenacious, stubborn, I admit to feeling more than a little pride.

Participating in the island’s evolution has always procured for me an intense feeling of belonging. Cutting into its stones, its trees, its earth fostered in me a clear sense of having roots.
A 400- meter path through the thick brush of the Domaine des Arbusiers was the first thing accomplished by the A.C.S.I.L., an association for sports and culture I’d founded in 1987 with a few friends, which I considered a way of strengthening ties born of the satisfaction of improving the island together.

From the moment this olive orchard was given to me, it became a sort of umbilical cord. Inherited from my paternal grandparents, it’s the sole tangible link I have with them today, since they were unable to will their grandchildren the four walls inside which their lives had unfolded.

$Upper Bonifacio sits atop a pedestal of cliff, and at its base, there’s a beach whose chalky cliffs wondrously refract light. Unless you’ve lived here, it’s hard to understand how we can appreciate a beach without any sand to speak of, where palpably uncomfortable boulders are the only place to lie down on.$