La Zone Nono

Born of deficit and shaped by the landscapes of refuge, this exhibition traces

the unseen topography of Beckett’s wartime years—where memory persists not

through monuments, but through absence, endurance, and the terrain itself.

During the German occupation of France (1940–1944), the region outside the

control of the collaborationist Vichy regime was known as la zone non occupée

—nicknamed ‘la zone nono’ by the French Resistance.

Wanted by the Nazis after his Resistance unit was betrayed, Irish writer Samuel

Beckett fled Paris in 1942 for the Luberon mountains of southern France, then

part of ‘la zone nono’. There, he remained an active member of the Resistance

until the end of the war.

Very little is known about Beckett’s time in hiding. There are no visual records,

no photographs, no memorials—only the acknowledgment that this experience

was crucial in shaping the coordinates of his later aesthetic.

His story unfolds within a landscape where commemoration of the Resistance is

deeply inscribed through French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of les lieux de

mémoire—a major intellectual project on French national memory. Across

France, plaques, monuments, and memorials mark the bravery of many.

Yet Beckett’s involvement leaves no such public trace. His memory endures not

through monuments or commemoration, but in the silences of the archive and

the resonances of his own writing—most powerfully in the spectral landscapes

of Waiting for Godot, where stasis, waiting, and unseen authority mirror the

absurdity and precariousness of life under occupation.