the earth does not exist

The project explores the telluric link between humans and matter, between the gestures of extraction and those of representation, through the layers of archives, industrial landscapes, and studio staging.

By combining photographs from the archives of french mining companies, shots taken recently in mining sites in France and Tierra del Fuego, as well as a studio scenography work, my project "the earth does not exist" explores the telluric link between humans and matter, between the gestures of extraction and those of representation.
These images, both documentary and reimagined, question spaces where the ground becomes both memory and projection. Through the layers of archives, industrial landscapes, and the interplay of shadows and light in the studio, the work offers an ambiguous and fragmented reading of the underground world.
Archaic and contemporary, the forms, textures, and lights create a visual experience that invites the viewer to get lost in the depths – encountering what both supports and eludes us.
In this corpus, the work on the form of prints and the materiality of the image is paramount. My process is multifaceted, but primarily based in this corpus on two aspects: the scenography of prints in the studio, photographs of photographs, and digital inversion, the back-and-forth between negative and positive, the creation of digital negatives that interact with material positives (minerals, liquids, objects), which are in turn inverted, in a logic of exploration and constant improvisation.

Here a brief presentation of Michel Poivert, art historian and critic :

Sarah Ritter's work has been addressing major ecosophical questions for several years. How can we represent matter, space, and our relationship to the world in the Anthropocene era? These vast questions are approached by the artist through a dialogue between scientific iconography and artistic experimentation. Both on-site and in the studio, she seeks to repopulate our traditional imagination of the elements. In this work, it is the element of earth that is explored: in a critical and dreamlike approach to extractivism, the artist re-imagines the mine as both a cradle and a void. Her work contributes to a profound question in the humanities under the term "spectral turn," which asks how entities manifest when we do not perceive them concretely.
Here, through studio work, experimentation, and archives, it is both the earth and the Earth that come together in the form of revenants. The aim is to critically and poetically analyze what "The Earth Does Not Exist" tells us about this "nonexistence," or rather about these new ways in which the earth/Earth manifests. This work thus contributes to a new imagination of the elements where humans (especially workers) themselves are the ghosts of a time exhausted by late capitalism.