I waited three years before I saw them appear, three years from the moment I started looking for them. I had not thought to look underwater. I had forgotten how vital water is to me. Water is the place where my roots sediment. Where, pacified, I can meet them.

To talk about this series, I will borrow words from the novel Les insurrections singulières by Jeanne Benameur:

“My work is to dive into darkness. Blind. Bring back some obscurity. A little part of what lies inside us but is so difficult to express. Now I know that dark areas are actually full, that they are the place where the words, the true ones, were, waiting. Human beings need darkness. It is fertile.”

What are these shadows? Corporeal shadows or forgotten memories? Cellular ghosts bathing in between two shores? Roots of a strange life emanate from them. Somewhere else, out of the water, there may be a body, a being. Work is in progress here, so slowly that the rhythm is imperceptible. It goes back to time immemorial. In silence, only calm surfaces.

Faced with that shore I can only ask questions. Asking them feels sweet. As if each shadow, and the questions it brings about, was, in itself, an answer. It took me so long to make them appear.

“Que protège de ses mains nues votre liturgie minérale”
Henri Bauchau