Extractions – Sarah Ritter, 2024

Attentive to the links between science, image and industry, Sarah Ritter has been carrying out research on extraction for several years by weaving links between the extraction activity of minerals, its past and contemporary history, and the extraction of data conducted by scientists.

The work presented here interweaves images from this research with the relatively preserved Hortillonnages site. The work intends to confront the different uses from outside: one drawn towards the preservation of the existing and its exhibition as an object of leisure and wonder; the other as a space to be exploited and therefore profoundly transformed, to extract the substances necessary for our lifestyles, such as the sand dredged from the shallows by barges and poured onto the land for building work, in a strange movement where the ocean floors cover the earth.

Strongly inspired by the Hortillonnages, surrounded by water with its canals intertwining and crisscrossing, the semi-aerial installation floats in space and offers a form of confusion, a mixture between real landscape and dream landscapes at the waterside. Like a look at our society which questions the connection between spaces, Extractions invites us to consider the impossibility of thinking about places in a compartmentalised way.