Dust to *dust
duo Khurtova & Bourlanges
Arti & Amicitiae, October 2018
performance and transient installation approx. h 1,7 x l 18 x w 8,3 meters
65 unfired clay replicas of Archive Nationale boxes of 27h x 35w x 45L cm each
Dust to *dust is the final chapter of the long term project The Sky is on the Earth based on Jacques Bourlanges’ archive.
The artists’ intention was to complete the project with a last gesture of letting go of the archive. The duo takes, as a starting point of this exercise, the anecdotal story of the archives of Jacques Bourlanges, which, through a series of oddly times co-incidences found itself in the storage containers of French Archives Nationales - an honour generally reserved for institutionally recognised relics of utmost importance. Jacques’ archives despite not being officially part of the Archives Nationales, by simply residing in the institution’s boxes, inherited a lofty position- and it was in these boxes that Khurtova and Bourlanges found them.
This pivotal incident spurred the artists to ponder and re-evaluate the mechanisms at work which give things historical meaning and importance and led them to develop methodologies which would be frowned upon by institutionalist archivists as destructive but in fact help to prolong the life of the archives. The duo produced 65 replicas out of unfired different clay that bear different tones of earth and cracks.
photo credits : Jessie Yingying Gong and MacSiers photography
with the support of Mondriaan Fonds & Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst
Special thanks ♥
Natalia Blahova, Roman Tkachenko, Jun Zhang, Chloé Sapelkine, Romy Yedidia, Mayra Sérgio, Maarten Heijkamp
3 part performance, duration 15 min each (documented in video, uploaded video extract 2min) with 65 unfired clay replicas of J. Bourlanges archive boxes
65 boxes are the main protagonists in a 3-part performance: two artists move the boxes in space, stack them, unstack them, push and pull: they resist and retain their integrity or break down and return to their original form of dust, earth and landscape.
performance registration film by Mathilde Renault – duration 9min, preview 2min (see here)
