Géométrie de la chute > Sylvie Bonnot, 2020

The installation is made up of 13 large stumps of Douglas pines from forests destroyed by a storm (epiphenomenon) south of the Saône-et-Loire, last December, overnight. These forests were shaped by the artist’s father; they adjoin the house of his childhood: they appear as a “root massif”. For more than four months, it is a photographic campaign undertaken in the continuity of the order “Derrière la retenue” (Fondation Facim, EDF, Actes Sud) which promotes the study and understanding of an overwhelming chaos. This new work of shots thus aims to take stock of an inverted intimate landscape, of trees on the ground, of monstrous stumps uprooted by winds of 150 km/h, today recurrent, and also testifies of climate change in our most ordinary landscapes. The latter evokes the violence of the trenches, the mutilated trees of the Great War. The wind has caused precarious mikados – windfall – which are destroying the orthogonality specific to forest plantations. The strains are the vestiges of 50 to 60 years of always manual work, of constant care. They form the substrate of this forest. Devoid of commercial value, their aesthetic characterisctics are striking, they attest as much to tearing as to attachment to the land. The site of the Hortillonnages of Amiens becomes the new framework for this root system. The 13 large stumps are installed in the perspective of the Cathedral of Amiens; they form a magmatic, muscular whole, vast decapitated and tangled fragments. The summer tranquility and the flatness of the site, its opening to the sky and the immediate proximity of the rieu allow a strong contrast with their original relief; the installation evokes an image of the violence at rest : the end of a drama while waiting for the next…