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.

It's hand-coded, no animation library. I take a single photograph and turn it into thousands of small squares on an HTML canvas - each one remembering where it belongs. From there it's just physics: the squares catch, lift off as ashes, drift, and then find their way back to their original spot. It only starts once you scroll it into view, so the page stays light until the moment it matters.