Mémoire en Chemin honours the thousands of civilians murdered in 1944 by the Nazis in the south-west of France.

Oradour-sur-Glane is the most infamous of these massacres. Around 600 people - many of them women and children - were locked inside the village church, which was then set on fire.

The animation sits on the homepage, right after the hero. It had to work on its own: striking enough to stop you, clear enough to understand without a caption, and heavy enough to stay with you.

The portrait is of an unknown young woman - one of the many people killed in 1944.

It burns into ashes that swirl and scatter.

It reads two ways at once: literally, this is how they died - and as a metaphor for lives that some people tried to erase.

The portrait is built from square particles, echoing the square markers on the site's interactive map. Each marker marks a place where the Nazis carried out a massacre, a murder, or an act of abuse in 1944.

Then the ashes find their way back, and rebuild her face. That's what a project like Mémoire en Chemin is for: these lives are remembered, not lost.

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No particle library were used for this animation. The velocity integration, the friction, the boundary damping, the rotation matrix that makes the drift swirl, the ember-propagation model — all hand-written.