This triptych conceived in 2023, relating to the history of phosphate mining, is a reactivation of the photographic series Traces d'une occupation humaine [2016- 2018] created in the different landscapes and singular places that make up the territory of the Gafsa Governorate's mining basin, a region located at the gateway to the Tunisian desert. It consists of 3 black and white silver prints (150 x 100 cm each) made on limestone fragments; rock present in the slag heaps of open-cast phosphate mining.
A photographic experiment and an exploration of its materiality, this triptych of silver prints on limestone fragments invites us to step out of a presentist vision of history and consider the Earth's geomorphic strata as a book to be deciphered: an Earth-book that narrates a more-than-human story over the long term that telescopes with our present time, and that we need to listen to. For less than 40 years, CPG's open-cast quarries have formed huge slag heaps at the center of a landscape that has formed naturally over millions of years. A landscape literally turned upside down, these slag heaps - artificial hills built by accumulating mine tailings, the waste products of mining operations - bring and outcrop deep sedimentary rock to the surface. Using the limestone rock found in the slag heaps of the open-cast phosphate mines as a support, these prints reflect the disproportionate anthropization of the geology of the Gafsa mining basin.
Silver prints made from stone fragments give the photographic material a presence that is both tangible and spectral. Like spectres of our anthropocenic civilization, memories enclosed in the heart of limestone sediments, these prints evoke the fragmentary archaeological remains of frescoes from an ancient civilization. Here, our linear perception of time is blurred: the categories of past, present and future do not necessarily follow one another, but intermingle in a conjunction of times. What era are we in when we look at this triptych? Are we archaeologists of the future, uncovering the remains of our own contemporary civilization? Or are these vestiges those of a past, vanished civilization?
In the form of an archaeology of the present, this work reconnects us to the spirit of place, to the materiality of phenomena, and suggests an alternative to a presentist vision of History, by linking us to a human and more than human History over the long term. Here, the modern and the ancient, the immemorial and the future are woven into the mineral flesh of a concussed world; here, in a conjunction of times, our civilizational spectres emerge "flush with stone", haunting us like traumas, and will continue to call out to us for as long as we fail to pay attention.
Height 150 cm x Width 320 cm x Depth 3 cm.
