Burning
old maps, bleach, plexiglas
serie 1 : 130x90 cm
serie 2 : 50x45 cm, 2018
On old plans of aborted constructions, a detail attracts the eye.
The wind roses, flowery pictograms that indicate the north, also the read direction. No North is the same, or nearly so. It’s as if they are signing, wanting to leave a trace. Essential to understand a map, they are also the places of fantasy that the architect grants himself.
I decide, as does the herbalist, to collect all species of «roses». When bleached, the surface of the plan is leached, burned. There is only left the lines faded from the ground, ghosts of walls and windows.
Burning is a traditional farming practice of fire clearing, tabula rasa that feeds the soil, preparing the next shoots.
There is only left on the maps the disoriented Norths, brown and bluish spots as tattooed.