Taphonomie Commune 14-18 from the Taphonomie series of the Réfléchissons-y… project.
Réfléchissons-y… ( Let’s think about it…)
Taphonomie Commune ( Common Taphonomy )
A term coined by Efremov in 1940, taphonomy is the study of burial in all its forms, leading to the formation of fossil deposits.
The artworks in the Taphonomie series evoke the memory of past lives. From their slabs emerge folds, lines, and traces like artifacts shaped by humans. Embedded, compressed, they bear witness to lives lived and gone.
The artwork Taphonomie Commune, 14 - 18 evoke the military memory and is exclusively composed of recycled paper pulp, family archives, plant fiber, and pins.
Recycled paper pulp represents the extracted blocks.
Family archives (military postcards ) are markers of past lives.
Plant fiber embodies the pain and suffering perpetuated on the battlefields that spread. Pins represent the act of willful preservation like the taxidermy.
The use of paper material allows me to work on the perception of the density of the artwork and to create metaphors around the fragility of life.
The blocks that appear to be made of concrete, in which family archives are embedded, suggest to the observer a certain mass and permanence even though it is not the case. The compression and embedding of family archives (military postcards - Verdun and the Battlefields) intensify the perception of fossilized lives in an imperishable from concrete matrix, reinforcing the sensation of confinement. The creation of swellings over the roughness created by compression adds a sense of oozing, heightened by the presence of plant fiber. Only a few pins seem to preserve these remnants of human traces...
