Mars ou crève is an epistolary painting that is part of What Wood you do?
a fictional project that loosely links two stories: the bark beetle
epidemic in France and the discovery of the Ishango bones in the Congo
in the 1950s. The story opened by this painting takes place in a context
of massive destruction of the planet's ecosystems, where the discovery
in France of unknown objects with strange inscriptions starts to
intrigue.
Mixing naturalistic representations of typographical
insects, handwriting and serpentine traces, this web collage-like
painting wishes to open a reflection on the forms of the living and the
ways in which humans interpret them from their situated point of view.
An invitation to learn what non-humans "do and express through their
form", as Anna Tsing puts it. As she reminds us: "If you draw a line
from your movement and materialise it, that line will tell your story".
By using the iconography and cosmologies of NASA and escapism - where pop culture meets Ancient and Christian divinities - What Wood you do?
aims to reveal how cultural production, through the fusion of the
fictional and the factual, participates in shaping our relationship to
the living and to the end of the world.
