A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones

This series celebrates an ontological pluralism in its effort to recognize a form of sensitivity and subjectivity to the forest natural entities, revealing the ancestral spirit of the oldest forests on Earth, dating back 385 million years.

My work seeks less to reproduce the image of the world, to document it, than to explore the primordial strangeness of our biosphere perceived as a cryptic world, in order to grasp its mesh, its interconnections and interrelations between human entities, non-human natural entities and the cosmos. It is precisely this entanglement that I question, calling for a re-imagination and an alternative re-foundation of narratives inviting humans to step out of an imaginary central position.

According to the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich «Art presents itself as a mediator between Nature and Humanity. The primitive model is too great, too sublime to be grasped». The artist is an intercessor of «Nature» whose art puts us directly in relation with it. He must express not only the appearance but also the hidden reality, the infinity of «Nature». Like a shaman, the artist becomes a liminal figure, a «translator», a «border-crosser» between the worlds of natural entities and humans, breaking down the separations between worlds usually dissociated from humans and non-humans, visible and invisible worlds, science and art.

Interceding as a translator of non-human natural entities, would consist then for an artist in conferring a visibility to their bodies, vibrating and sensitive, visible and invisible, in listening to their voices and the narratives that they whisper in our ears, in recognizing their cosmic-political condition within our present as it is the case in the animist societies.

My research is based on the idea that in order to inhabit our present world with an acute awareness of it, it is necessary to leave a presentist vision of history by rethinking the place of each being (human or non-human, living or non-living) within the cosmos as the result of a long history that is more than human, and to consider the geomorphic layers of the Earth as a book to be deciphered: a multi-memorial book-Earth where different «doors to the past» «pop up», which tells a story of origins that telescopes with our present time, and that we need to listen to.

My approach is based on the conviction that it is necessary to break down the vision of a homogeneous and linear temporal continuum, to look back and narrate the past in the mode of an encounter with the present in order to bring out new narratives, new potentials. Beyond ourselves, an immemorial given can always emerge again. This lightning experience of the emergence of the immemorial is what Walter Benjamin calls the aura. It is «not the past that illuminates the present nor the present that illuminates the past», but the present and the past that intermingle in a conjunction of times where the immemorial, original past is restored, that is to say, made actual, but as something unfinished, always open, where the potentiality of future times that have not yet been actualized is already in germ.

A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones presents photographic works resulting from my research at the New York State Museum in Albany NY. Detailed exploration within the Paleobotany Collection allowed me to capture photographically the fossil remains of the oldest forests on Earth found in Gilboa and Cairo dating from the Middle Devonian (385 million years ago). In conjunction with this exploration in the museum’s reserves, my research has been enriched by photographic work carried out in the heart of several contemporary forests in France and the United States.

This series is articulated around the echoing of two bodies of images, each one being the photographic materialization of a more than human temporality - one testifying to the ancestral memory of the original forest, the other revealing the vibrant spectrum of contemporary forests - each reverberating in the other. The first constellation reveals the imprint of the plant memory of the oldest forest on Earth, dating from the Middle Devonian, transmuted within fossil fragments found in the Catskills. The second constellation is the spectral embodiment of an original temporality, a fossil vibration, the survival of an “ancestral spirit” that manifests itself in the heart of the forests of the present. The space of the exhibition is then thought as the memorial and vibrating body - in subtle intertwined layers - of the forest.

The Piezography printing process (carbon inks, 10 shades of grey composed of coal black pigments) on Japanese paper gives the photographic material a presence that is both spectral and radiant. These prints evoke the experiences of the pioneers of photography who for some tried to record “spectral apparitions”, invisible afterimages. Imprinted with a black and vibrant light, lactescent and slick, the images of a charcoal chemistry with iridescent shades are like the imprint of a plant memory and echo a latent space-time, ancestral, holding both material and immaterial, physical and invisible memories of this original forest and of these contemporary forests.

Fossils, original imprints of an archaic past, would be transmuted forms of living beings disappeared during geological times. I perceive these fossil prints as original photographic imprints embodying the vibrant memory of the first forests dating back hundreds of millions of years through the phenomena of long and silent transmutations from plant to mineral. In a process that Michel Tournier calls iconization, the imprint, the fossil image would take the place of the represented subject and would acquire a reality more striking and a truth stronger than those of the subject itself. This process of iconization resonates with the theory of spectra relative to the photographic process as imagined by Honoré de Balzac at the beginning of the daguerreotype in 1842. According to Nadar, “According to Balzac, every body in nature is composed of series of spectra, in layers superimposed to infinity, foliated in infinitesimal films. (...) Each Daguerrian operation thus came to surprise, detach and retain by applying it one of the layers of the objected body.” Thus, according to Balzac, each object would cease to be, at least in part, by becoming an image. Consequently, this photographic process would be a device to “give birth” to ghosts.

During my shooting, I tried to capture the spectrum of this pure spirit [that] grows beneath the bark of the stones, the “almost photographic” fossil imprint of the spirit of the Devonian forests enclosed for 385 million years in the mineral shell of this ancestral paleosol.

According to the Devonian Plant Hypothesis (DPH) developed in Paleobotany, the process of afforestation of the Earth by these early Middle Devonian forest ecosystems of Gilboa and Cairo, had considerable consequences on the dynamics of the Earth system, including the transformation of the geomorphology of the soils, the evolution of the atmosphere and climate and the related expansion of the terrestrial biodiversity. Geomorphology and terrestrial environments were transformed through various processes of weathering and soil production. The atmosphere and climate of the planet changed radically: these original forests helped to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, sequestering it and forming rich deposits of charcoal, resulting in the atmosphere we know today. All of these processes had a major impact on the different animal species that evolved within these new terrestrial ecosystems.

Like a revenant, the mineralized and charcoal spectres of the Gilboa and Cairo forests emerge from the depths of the past and return to haunt us today to remind us that without them and by extension without the current forests that we are deforesting, the proliferation of terrestrial animal life outside the oceans could not have unfolded on Earth. These primordial forests remind us that the world in which we live, we humans, could not have existed without their presence.

In parallel to this investigation at the New York State Museum, I have been photographing contemporary forests in Europe and the United States with the aspiration of translating the sensitive experience of an original temporality, a fossil vibration, the survival of an ancestral spirit that manifests itself in the heart of the forests of the present. I immersed myself in the forests around Albany NY (USA), not far from the Gilboa and Cairo fossil sites. I returned to explore the forest of my childhood in Haute-Marne (France), whose renewed experience has given me a love of forests since childhood and which since 2019 has been an integral part of the National Forest Park dedicated to the deciduous forests of the plains, their springs and rivers. I went deep into the freely evolving biological reserves of the Tillaie, the Gros Fouteau and the Hauteurs de la Solle of the Fontainebleau forest (France). My quest to materialize the vibration of this original vegetal memory is consubstantial with the experience of this flesh of the world, lived in the heart of different forests: an experience linking body and mind, sensibility and visions (the inner eye), open to the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible. From the twilight photographic prints - made in Piezography - emerges the vibration of this archaic vegetal memory and comes to embody it in the iridescent shimmer and the density of the charcoal inks. Like fossil images, the piezographic prints operate a form of alchemical transmutation from the vegetable state to the mineral state.

Like the eponymous line of Gérard de Nerval’s poem, A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones celebrates nothing less than ontological pluralism3 in its effort to recognize a form of sentience and subjectivity in non-human natural entities, in this case forests. Recognizing a spirit acting in each stratum of nature - animal, vegetable, mineral - relativizes any ontological superiority of humanity. It seems to me that the scenarios of our future will only be possible if they are envisaged collectively and in an interspecies alliance between humans and natural entities, and to use Donna Haraway’s expression in a “Becoming with”. These forest entities invite humans to step out of a central position and point us to future paths of eco-collaboration. This project attempts to explore this vision and invites us to move from an anthropocentric perception to a biocentric apprehension of the world, towards a form of awareness that we are part of a network of interactions with other life forms.