Tout se met à flotter (spring)
2024

Tout se met à flotter (spring), 2024, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, diptych, 205 × 310 cm

Tout se met à flotter, “everything begins to float.” So says Antoine Roquentin, lost in reverie over the root of a chestnut tree. The main protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea soon realizes that he himself is only one of the objects surrounding him. His honored human viewpoint becomes insignificant. His personality dissolves in the infinite multitude of the impersonal, while existence with its disorder, absurdity, and nakedness becomes alien. The humanist feeling of “everything begins to float” can be compared to the concept of flat ontology, which plays a central role in contemporary posthumanist philosophy. The adjective “flat” refers to the fact that every entity, be it human or nonhuman, living or dead, has equal ontological status. Namely, no one and nothing has an exceptional position or significance as compared to another.

The diptych represents the proliferation of an Alpine forest’s ground vegetation on two color-negative photographs. Since human perception primarily focuses on bright colors, contrasts, sounds, and movements, phenomena that once signaled danger and directly affected the survival of our species, quiet, slow, and uninterrupted vegetal existence was confined to the periphery of human attention and became an unnoticed background of our lives. The work offers a double gesture. On the one hand, it presents an otherwise neglected form of existence in an unusually large format. On the other, it suspends the viewer’s spatial perception by reversing the image into negative, “everything begins to float” in the absence of shadows. Our perception is overwhelmed by enforced interpretation. It keeps trying to attach meaning to forms. The complementary colors, hues, and contrasts that replace the habitual green ground compel the mind to relearn and relate in a new way. The represented place ceases to be a place and is taken over by the sight of a strange, alien, decentralized, non-hierarchical organization of vegetal actors. The simple gesture of the negative image reveals our habitual perceptual disorders and deficiencies, which results in the contingency, quality, and radical otherness of hidden vegetative existence. Inverted imaging is not only an aesthetic mode of expression but an attempt to rethink our relationship to our ways of seeing and to nature.

Tout se met à flotter (spring), 2024, detail

Tout se met à flotter (spring), 2024, detail

Tout se met à flotter (spring), 2024, detail