Defigurines

2020

plâtre-résine, peinture
hauteur 21-46 cm

African figurines are reproduced through moulding in several stages. Using a flexible mould, each stage is fractured before the next is cast. In the end the disfigured figurines — whole and broken at once — bear the trace of these cracks, which forge their identity as objects from cultures damaged by colonisation. And yet they withstand these many fractures.

Seemingly paradoxical, these states echo the famous image of Schrödinger’s cat: the superposition of two mutually exclusive states. A cat is either dead or alive, but in this quantum thought experiment the two states are coupled and exist simultaneously. The sculptures tend toward this superposition of two incompatible conditions — objects broken and whole at the same time. Going further still, it is because they are broken that they remain whole. The tension held within the pieces extends across several levels: within a single object, the wild and the civilised, the whole and the fragmented, the natural and the cultural, the original and its copy are all entangled.

These are not images or illustrations of a theory, but the very source of the reflection — the place where thought can begin.