A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones

This series embraces ontological pluralism by recognizing the sensitivity and subjectivity of forest entities, unveiling the ancestral spirit of Earth’s oldest forests—dating back 385 million years—and their enduring presence within the living world.

A Pure Spirit Grows Beneath the Bark of Stones

Amélie Labourdette envisions the geomorphic strata of the Earth as a book to be deciphered—a book-Earth. Through a perspectivist reading of the territory and the capturing of traces, each project delves into the intricate relationships between humans, the terrestrial biosphere, and the cosmos. Using photography as her medium, she explores the primordial strangeness of our kósmos, perceived as an encrypted world, seeking to unveil its interwoven fabric and the interplay between human and non-human natural entities. It is precisely this entanglement that she interrogates, calling for a reimagining of narratives that urge humans to relinquish their illusory centrality.

These works celebrate ontological pluralism (1), observing multiple modes of existence and acknowledging a form of sensitivity and subjectivity within non-human entities. To recognize an active spirit at work within every stratum of nature—animal, vegetal, mineral—is to dissolve any ontological superiority ascribed to humanity. Like a shaman, the artist becomes a liminal figure, an intercessor between the worlds of natural entities and humans, dismantling the separations that conventionally divide human from non-human realms, the visible from the invisible, and science from art.

A Pure Spirit Grows Beneath the Bark of Stones (2) presents photographic works stemming from Amélie Labourdette’s research at the New York State Museum in Albany. Her meticulous exploration of the Paleobotany Collection enabled her to photograph fossilized remnants of the Earth’s oldest known forests, discovered in Gilboa and Cairo, dating back to the Middle Devonian period (385 million years ago). Alongside this archival investigation, her research was enriched by photographic work conducted in contemporary forests across France and the United States.

This series unfolds as a dialogue between two bodies of images, each embodying a temporality beyond the human scale—one bearing witness to the ancestral memory of the primeval forest, the other revealing the vibrant specters of present-day woodlands—each reverberating through the other. Labourdette seeks to reveal an active spirit within every layer of nature—both vegetal and mineral—challenging any presumed ontological primacy of humanity. Her work aligns with contemporary research in Jurisprudence of the Earth, which advocates for extending the political sphere into Cosmopolitics, integrating non-human entities as subjects of rights within legal and political frameworks—an "expanded parliament."

The first corpus unveils the vegetal memory imprint of the Earth’s oldest known forest, dating back to the Middle Devonian, transmuted from plant matter into mineral form within fossilized remnants found in the Catskills. According to the Devonian Plant Hypothesis in Paleobotany, the afforestation of the Earth by these pioneering forest ecosystems had profound consequences on planetary dynamics, including the transformation of soil geomorphology, atmospheric evolution, climatic shifts, and the concurrent expansion of terrestrial biodiversity. Like revenants, the mineralized and carbonized specters of these primordial forests rise from the depths of time, returning to haunt us today as a spectral reminder that the world we inhabit as humans could not have come into being without their presence. The second corpus embodies the vibration of this fossilized memory, a lingering ancestral spirit manifesting within the forests of the present. To materialize the vibration of this primordial vegetal memory is inherently linked to the experience of the flesh of the world (3), as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty—an experience lived within diverse forests, interweaving body and mind, attunement to the vibratory frequencies of places, and visionary perception—an inner eye attuned to both the tangible and the intangible.

Trees are electromagnetically active, emitting and receiving signals. They function as antennas, capturing, absorbing, and transmitting ultra-low electromagnetic frequencies between 4 and 7 Hertz. The Earth itself possesses a measurable vibratory frequency, known as the Schumann resonance, whose fundamental frequency is 7.83 Hz. Researchers have observed that the electromagnetic pulses of trees synchronize with the geomagnetic pulses of the Earth’s core and correlate with human brain waves. In the presence of trees, as within forests, human brain waves align with this 7.83 Hz frequency, inducing an altered state of consciousness—a meditative or creative state associated with theta and alpha brain waves. I believe I have intuitively grasped this primordial vibratory frequency, both in my gut and in the deepest layers of my mind (inner vision). These are the frequencies I have sought to translate in a sensitive and visual manner within this photographic work.

The Piezography printing process on Japanese paper, using inks composed of carbon black pigments, imbues the photographic material with a presence that is both dense and radiant. These prints evoke the early experiments of photography’s pioneers, some of whom sought to capture spectral apparitions. Within the iridescent shimmer and the dense charcoal-black inks of these prints emerges the vibration of an archaic vegetal memory. After all, is not charcoal itself the result of the partial decomposition of organic forest matter—an alchemical transformation spanning millions of years, transmuting vegetal into mineral? The very materiality of these prints, composed of the transmuted dead body of these primeval forests, encloses their spectral memory.

A Pure Spirit Grows Beneath the Bark of Stones is thus conceived as a memorial and vibratory body—an interwoven layering of subtle strata—of the forest.

Notes:

(1) From a biocentric perspective, ontological pluralism refers to an approach that acknowledges the multiplicity of life forms and perspectives, granting equal value to different non-human and human entities within the universe.

(2) The flesh of the world is a concept developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, referring to the fundamental interconnectedness and sensory fabric of existence.

(3) A Pure Spirit Grows Beneath the Bark of Stones takes its title from a line in Gérard de Nerval’s poem Vers dorés.