Taphonomie Familiale - Emma & Lucien 1959 - 1961 from the Taphonomie series of the Réfléchissons-y… project.
Réfléchissons-y… ( Let’s think about it…)
Taphonomie Familiale ( Familial Taphonomy )
A term proposed by Efremov in 1940, taphonomy is the study of burial in all its forms, leading to the formation of fossil deposits.
Taphonomie Familiale - Emma & Lucien 1959 - 1961 evokes the memory of their past lives.
From slabs emerge folds, lines, and traces like artifacts shaped by humans. Embedded, compressed, they bear witness to lives lived and gone.
It is exclusively composed of recycled paper pulp, family archives, and pins.
This artwork is exclusively composed of recycled paper pulp, family archives, and pins.
The recycled paper pulp represents the extracted blocks.
Family archives (tourist postcards) are markers of past lives.
Pins embody 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.
In the artwork Taphonomie Familiale - Emma & Lucien 1959 - 1961, the blocks that appear to be made of concrete, in which tourist postcards from their various bicycle trips are embedded, suggest to the observer a certain mass and permanence even though it is not the case. The compression and embedding of these postcards intensify the perception of fossilized lives in an imperishable concrete’s matrix, reinforcing the sensation of confinement. The creation of swellings over the embedded folds adds a sense of resistance.
Only a few pins seem to preserve these remnants of human traces, traces of a family history gone for several decades.
