Grand Feu is a visual art project in which the photographic medium and textual material are used to cross-reference two views of the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region, with the aim of revealing, in the present, the traces of a mythical and tragic element of the region's past, the Great Fire of 1870. Grand Feu is based on the collaboration of photographers Nicolas Lévesque and Sophie Gagnon-Bergeron, who have been creative partners for the past ten years, and whose work shares a common thread: an ongoing questioning of our collective and intimate ways of inhabiting the land.

For the photographers, the great fire of 1870, its nature and its memory, are the starting point for a joint creation in the form of an investigation, a visual quest with many questions: what remains of fire in and around us today? Is it part of us? What purpose have its symbolic and literal forms served? How have they been actualized, how have things changed? What remains of it in our experience of the world? Does it say anything about us? We're betting that following in the footsteps of fire, in search of the shards of its presence, will lead to the creation of a visual and textual work that will embody our identity in an unprecedented way, our presence in the world and in this territory that we are profoundly modifying, and which is modifying us in return.

This research is supported by the Quebec Arts and Letters Council via the territorial partnership program and by the Table Agroalimentaire du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean.