Paysage Fossile – Installation – Mémorial Montormel

In this Montormel memorial, several things touched me, the contrast between the beauty of the landscape and the horror of what happened: the non-evacuated civilians, hidden in cramped places, the death row which remained with the traces of the battle for a long time, the civilians who had to live during and after with the tanks and the corpses.
A small place, out of proportion to the battle, where it rained for three days as if to signify that the sky was crying for the madness of men.
The earth has buried the traces of the past, the landscape is intact and yet some vestiges remain.
A subsidence of the earth means that there are surely bodies underneath, scratches on a house recall a maneuver of a tank, a gun barrel planted in a tree an explosion.
These marks shown to me by Stéphane Jonot, the director of the Mémorial de Montormel, allow us to demonstrate the importance of these footprints if we know how to observe them. It is the memory of the earth that passes through the human, which is intersected by testimonies and stories.
It is a terrible battle that nature swallowed but did not forget.
The Montormel memorial is a museum to remember.

It was for me, who works in suspension, obligatory for these works to come to earth. Plexiglass plinths, a museum case, are placed on the ground. They contain "landscaped fossils" like an archaeological dig of the sensitive. We squat to watch, we take the time, we collect ourselves.
I felt the urge to create remnants of the memory of this place. Between model, hilly landscape and hidden bodies, shapes, shells, come to life with porcelain mixed with metal fibers (metal remained in this corridor for a long time).

The earth is cut, sectioned like parcels of land, then put on fire (cooking) and finally assembled, sewn, sutured, repaired. First fossils.

The porcelain then mixes with the glass beads, to pierce the earth: rain, bullets, impacts. Second fossilized landscape

Then comes the cellulose, the mineral gives way to the vegetable. Like the wild clematis on a dead tree, the steel fiber settles down, dresses, protects, camouflages the landscape. It takes off like a seed to plant the memory.
Third fossilized landscape.

Finally, the plants dipped in the porcelain come to disappear under the effect of the fire and form plant bones. Plants are intimately linked with man and his disappearance.

All these interpretations of these fossilized landscapes mix questions and reflections around the trace of the history of Montormel which becomes the great History.