Installation view: charcoal drawing, stone powder, 4 sound monitors, Teresa Arêde voice 18’48”, skeleton.

A visual and sound installation: looking at the ground is looking at the landscape that accumulates ruin over ruin and thinking of Angelus Novus. This angel of history who stared straight at us and drifted away in the gale of progress. It no longer looks at us! It is we humans who look at him and see his back as if we were not part. We take the place of what has not been destroyed, a place that is not yet. A suspension. But this place that is not yet, after all is already the ruin in which we live: our oíkos.

The drawing is assembled from our home analyses. Let us begin with the places where we humans are extracting or appropriating nature: these analyzed landscapes frame by frame form cutouts and paper collages which I ‘play’ with on the table – I need time … and ‘play’ again – maybe by default, I see the drawing as a film, an experimental film, to which I add frames that juxtapose and build a possible mural.

My trip to Chile put me in direct contact with battlefields: immense territories of mining and murals covering large walls that represent the voice of local communities. These voices question the defence of our home, the planetary home. Excessive extractivism, both agricultural and ore, has shown that this cannot be the way. The destruction of the environment and its imbalance as well as the local communities and indigenous peoples makes me mourn along with the voice of Teresa Arêde. It is a two-voice cry, one voice that is expressed by the drawing and the other that comes from the floor.

When viewing these suffering territories, cemeteries of miners and families, contamination of chemical-painted waters that resemble nothing like the colors of the waters we need to live, particles that flutter in the air without knowing whether or not we can inhale them, bones that mingle in the abandoned barren, killing species that they no longer find their habitat, all because we want to continue to feed the progress machine based on the same structures. But if we look at the ground we see that these structures are already our ruins.

When the last tree is felled,

the last poisoned river,

the last fish caught,

only So

you will realize

that money is not eaten.

                                (Amerindian proverb) 

Installation view with daylight