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For the deep eye able to see, the caves are screams, I like the noise of all the caves. The caves are for me places of beliefs and trances. Deep in our collective imagination, these caves shelter monsters, brigands and, even more clearly, the very gates of hell. I hope that these fantastic spaces, produced by the time inside the mountain, have served the construction of the stories that carried the first artistic traces. I glimpse their authors, how they inspired them and in what kind of altered consciousness it took them. I travel inside my body. I search for the origin of spirituality in my unconscious. I meet an asymmetrical part of the brain, called the pineal gland. Among other qualities, the latter tells me that it has the strange function of secreting DMT, the chemical substance at the base of the psychedelic trance trips of the Ayahuasca ceremonies. I then see these men again, making paintings in the caves. They know this trip. They turn to ask me how many of the beliefs that depend on these substances still hold true today. They confide in me: the one who speaks in original images expresses himself, in short, through thousands of voices.
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One day, a scrap dealer from whom I came to collect material told me that aluminum is only found in rock at purity levels never exceeding 99.4 or 99.5%. In spite of this, it is said that 99.9% pure aluminum was found in the Sahara. It is said that it came from a meteorite named Hypatia.
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The night legitimizes all kinds of candor: that of the real child or that of the one we are trying to become. I travel almost systematically with a telescope that I have motorized and transformed into a camera lens. Together we learn to look at the sky, to read the constellations. We make important discoveries of planets that are sometimes only dust on the lens. We curse every evening the light of the cities which empty the sky of these stars. It invites humans to escape from the metaphysical questions that guide existence, but also from the strong feeling of belonging to something greater. So we measure ourselves as many times as possible to the immensity of the sky. Like the first humans, we scan this vault as if to orient ourselves, to build or to redefine the notion of time. We try to explain what we observe, by populating this sky with gods and demons. And as much as we can, we make our imagination go up to the cosmic level where it gives us each time a happy consciousness, a demiurgic consciousness.
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The Avalanche exhibition brought together 110 artists, all of whom were invited to entrust us with a work that we destroyed and ground into powder. We then hung what was left of the works on the wall in separate transparent bags. The gallery offered these materials for retail sale. All the artists were sold at the same price: 100 euros per gram.
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In Beijing, there is an old observatory where ancestral astronomical tools are displayed. They lie outside as if forgotten there, almost abandoned. It is said that these heavy and massive cast iron objects were made to allow our ideas to be detached from the earthly force and explore the cosmos. From the sky these objects do not tell us much about science today, but their numerous ornaments of dragons and other chimerical figures remind me of those ancient times when the stones in the bowels of the earth and the planets in the vault of heaven still cared about human destiny.
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Haunted houses, ghosts, immensity and animist universes, so many beliefs of the day which preserved the man from the night anguish of chaos. It is rarer and rarer to meet people who know how to tell a story. It is said that this is because the art of storytelling is being lost. The fact that the thought of death has lost its omnipresence and its suggestive force in the collective consciousness, would have taken us away from everything that used to feed the accounts of the past. It is said that the idea of eternity is slowly weakening in human minds. Our contemporary society, by allowing men to no longer witness the death of their fellow men, would have removed death from the attention of the living. In the past, there was hardly a house, or even a room in the house, that did not see someone die. But, as we know, it is especially in the dying person that not only the knowledge or wisdom of a man takes communicable form, but above all the life he has lived, that is to say, the material from which stories are made.
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Located in the heart of the historic center of the city of Belfort, a town on the European borders, the Cantine d’Art Contemporain occupies since 1997 one of the military buildings from the Vauban architecture. With the help of forty students from the city’s art school, we invested the art center with 40 000 kg of sand. During two weeks, we built ephemeral constructions from a vocabulary of military architecture that I provided them. Like children on the beach, who are taught at an early age that war is just a category of adventure stories, we built these ramparts without adding any substitutes to the sand to prevent it from collapsing as it dried.
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I remember my encounter with small bronze figures discovered in the archaeological museum in Athens. They had been pulled out of the sea water after hundreds of years. Their arms and legs had been attacked by rust, had swollen and had opened in a surprising way giving mutant forms to these small metallic figures. I then thought that if I could apply a system that would reproduce the effect of a river by perpetually flooding a metal object, the latter would eventually become unrecognizable and become a part of nature again, like a rock. I would then have to set up a process of rust and concretion programmed over hundreds, even thousands of years.
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The studio was having some rodent problems, so I set out to make sculptures that would function as traps to catch the rats. Then it turned into an environment littered with car parts. A large mechanized rodent wheel would allow them to turn an industrial propeller, or another time, to water a plant at the other end of the space. After negotiating a peace deal, I finally decided to free the rats.
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In Otsuka, Japan, it is said that a museum permanently exhibits over a thousand copies of iconic works of Western art history. Da Vinci, Bosch, Dürer, Velasquez, Caravaggio, Delacroix, Turner, Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Dali, Rothko, all the stars would be there. The paintings would be reproduced on ceramic plates, supposed to remain intact until the year 4014, thus surviving the originals which were their reason for being. These ceramics would not simply be duplicates, but substitutes; their purpose would be to fix in a permutational way fragile images and ephemeral history. Otsuka would even take it a step further by now working on the resurrection of the lost. The latest acquisition to the permanent collection would be the first copy of a work that no longer exists. A painting of sunflowers in a vase by Vincent Van Gogh, destroyed in 1945. Like its surroundings, the painting was burned to the ground in an air raid over Ashima on August 5 and 6. Yet, according to the brilliantly colored ceramic plaque now on display in this museum, its destruction never took place.
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In 2018, I burned my previous exhibition from The Time I Am Made Of and used the ashes as fertilizer to allow invasive plants to grow through.
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In the center of Moscow, there is a promenade that is nicknamed the Fallen Monument Park. Today it is a resting place for many statues removed from parks and public squares after the collapse of the communist bloc. You can meet a Stalin with a broken nose, and a little further on, you will recognize Lenin, in a version that is a little too stocky to be installed in the public space. There follow all sorts of sculptures of a style that has not been able to seduce the various regimes that have succeeded. This cumbersome past, which has been dragged out of public places without daring to destroy it completely, now takes the form of a mysterious walk through the different rewritings of Russian history.
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In The Book of Mutations of the I Ching, there is a definition to try to explain the functioning of the world through an epic of the elements. In this text, fire, earth, water, wood and metal are considered in a general movement named 五行 (Wu Xin - five act/movements). They can interact through a cycle of destruction or engenderment. In the cycle of begetting: Metal can be melted by high temperature and becomes liquid: water. Water waters and grows trees: wood. Wood can be lit and produce fire. Fire can burn plants which become ash, a kind of earth. The earth contains minerals, the source of metal.
Conversely, in the cycle of destruction, metal can slice through wood. The wood in turn can draw out the earth. Earth can absorb water. Water can extinguish fire. Finally, fire can melt metal. It is also said that flow processes are in the nature of water. Fire is related to the process of combustion, wood to the process of construction, metal to metallurgy, earth to agriculture. The term 行 (xing), is used in Chinese to denote these entities. It means “to walk, to go, to act” and thus confirms their dynamic nature, while also establishing chains of correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between nature and man. In the Guoyu 國語 (Discourse of the Realms), they are mentioned as the constituents whose union forms the ten thousand things and beings of creation. -
She is always the first to arrive. My oldest acquaintance and also my best friend.
She slips through cellar grates, breaks fences, sneaks in between boards and piles of abandoned garbage. And this in almost every country in the world. She always arrives between the moment when people leave and return. She is the measure of the time that has passed since the collapse of a space. The more it is cut, the better it grows back. She is excessively tolerant to pollution, so she has made the city her playground. She is an opportunist, she spends her time sunbathing in the sun. She has been following me for over ten years. Everywhere I go, I run into her. Some people call her the tree of heaven. No matter the conditions, she is adventurous, and I think I admire her for that. No matter where the seed falls, it always strives to reach the sky. It is able to survive without sun, without water and apparently maybe without land. Scientists, they call her Ailanthus Altissima . She is mentioned in the oldest Chinese dictionary for her medicinal virtues. We use her to treat mental illness. But I know that she got kicked out of the oriental gardens for her smell. Yes, she’s beautiful, but they nicknamed her “stinking spring”. I prefer her American nickname, “the palm tree of the ghettos”. -
At night I don’t sleep anymore. To lull me to sleep, I dream that I am flying over the Parisian ring road. I see again the roofs of this battery factory whose white contours are erased by invasive plants able to grow in the concrete. They play the score supposed to crack the ground, they open wooden boxes and let appear huge plaster Jesus, or heavy stones of disassembled churches. The narrow alleys turn into tunnels of green light, sliding down to the deepest cellars where mechanical treasures remain lost. The plants transform the concrete buildings into an adventure ground where each abandoned space is offered like a supermarket of used things. They run along the wires that the rats follow, like the current that turns on the lamps and turns off the sky. Up there, they take me into the immense, silent space. Crossed by rectilinear movements, debris of matter traveling at an inconceivable speed, where a human body is nothing, without gravity, nor density of existence.
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As if the Molotov cocktail could facilitate the emergence of a very first “language”, shared between all the manifestations, a primitive language not really spoken, but brandished on posters. Today the materials used to create these paintings, glass, soot and smoke, interest me because they have served to describe a place abandoned by men. Exactly as after a fire, in an atmosphere of a deserted city, where only the shadows of things would remain, like ectoplasms of vanished forms or the silhouettes of human bodies vaporized on the walls of Hiroshima. Unable to freeze the beauty of the flame on a canvas, I discovered that I could capture its movement. Once the color of fire, now the color of ash, soot is like the dust of destruction, its most minute material. As if to manifest the fire one last time, it appears to me as the surviving matter. Invasive, it soils and haunts the material on which it is deposited, and inhabits it like a ghost. The ash carries the memory of the light and the brightness. It proceeds from the blaze, as if the brightness could only be extinguished, as if the light could only darken.
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In 2016, during the first French demonstrations for the social movement Nuit Debout, I shot images of police officers using a camera screwed onto a very, very large telescopic stand. Using this laughable tool, I obtained images with a surveillance camera angle. I then applied to these images an algorithm for detecting abnormal behavior equivalent to those used in the surveillance of public places. The police officers, amassed and static, came out surrounded by beautiful little red squares.
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Invested in a collective workshop project that forced us to move regularly, we began this adventure by occupying a very large complex of a former battery factory in the northern suburbs of Paris. We were like embalmers who had come to give the kiss of death to these already abandoned architectures. We certainly repaired them, but our passage systematically meant an upcoming demolition. In these spaces, one could find everything, objects, materials, ghosts. All bore the mark of time in a significant way. As I lived between the construction site and the ruin, I often tried to describe this moment of matter where one does not know anymore if it is the beginning or the end of something.
Nelson Pernisco, 2023
