Black Archive (post-morta) · 2026
peat charcoal, carbon black, water, cotton fabric · performance and installation · 150 cm × 400 cm
Created within the context of Useful Fictions 6 / Lab 2 Sound of Silence (Saint-Nazaire, May 2026), with charcoal extracted from Brière peat by Yann Le Jeune, geoarchaeologist.
Carbon is the constitutive element of all life — forged in the heart of stars, scattered across the cosmos by their explosions, it traverses the scales of time down to the most humble organic matter. It is what remains when everything else disappears. The carbon mobilised here comes from two origins: Brière peat — organic fossil matter preserved by water over millennia — and carbon black, elemental carbon produced by combustion. One conserved by water, the other released by fire. Both, from stars.
The data comes from the EPICA ice core — 800,000 years of Earth’s climatic history, a narrative that radically exceeds anthropocentric time. Compressed onto 150 cm of folded white cotton, it is deposited point by point during a performance: carbon suspended in water inscribes itself into the fabric according to climatic oscillations, moving from present to past. Gravity and capillarity become the agents of form — scientific data acquires organic materiality, it is lost in the fibre, it ages. Micro-phenomena emerge — fractal dispersion, halos, filaments. Different temporal scales coexist within the same surface: deep time inscribed in the data, the time of the performance, the immediate time of drying.
What strikes in the final form is its musicality. The EPICA curve translated into successive deposits produces a visible rhythm — dense zones and silences that follow one another like beats, strong pulses and hollows. Deep time has a cadence. The unfolded fabric reveals a quasi-symmetry: two faces from the same deposit, never identical, distributed by the physics of the liquid. Perfect symmetry is silence. Asymmetry is what creates movement.