This throne is a marble reproduction of the base of a sequoia tree. A remnant of a family garden and witness to several generations, this tree became a seat after its death. Years later, this stump speaks to me, I sense a grandmother within it. I see a wooden Pietà. I spent a month excavating it. Once uncovered, its roots revealed to me an inverted family tree, where descendants, a living network, plunge into the earth. A real memory exploring a universal origin.
This complete family tree, both visible and invisible, intertwines, in my eyes, matrilineal and patrilineal lineages in a complementary dynamic. The nourishing roots anchor identity in its original stability, while the branches and fruits, ideal fathers, reach toward the future. In this way, the seat illustrates our position "between" earthly matter and luminous ether. We would be that point of union.
The Matriarchal Seat proposes origin not as a point located in the past, but as an active presence that continues to nourish the way we inhabit the world. Yet what interests me is the brutality with which this image of the tree, a cliché - a classical vision of the immanent and the transcendent, questioning the inheritances that silently pass through us - is here interrupted by a seat. It is there that a Pietà appears to me: the act of birth, the passage into life, the passage into death. The ON-OFF of our presence, sustained by an eternal gentleness.
Transposing this organic remnant - the original wooden Matriarchal Seat, on which one can sit and thus demonstrate an activity, if not a function - into marble fixes its complete image in contemplation, within a sacred space. It also becomes a stone intended to rest upon the graves of our mothers.
