THE ARCHEOLOGY OF THE PRESENT Amélie Labourdette's “Empire of Dust” series explores the strata of the history of human communities, shedding light on the social and aesthetic characteristics of a landscape modified by the presence of unfinished constructions: the ecomostri, these creatures of concrete erected in the hollow of a valley, or on the side of a hill. The artist, awarded a Sony Photography Award in the architecture category in 2016 for this series, presents her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Thierry Bigaignon in Paris. Empire of Dust indeed explores an Italy populated by ecomostri. The neologism designates a plurality of situations referring to unfinished constructions, pointed out as being in inadequacy with the landscape, offending the gaze. Some constructions are public, others private. Some are illegal, others lack funds to be completed, still others are pretexts for money laundering. Entire villages, hotel complexes, sections of motorway, bridges, isolated villas. They reveal even beyond their forms and their plastic typologies realities that cross the economy and society of southern Italy: money laundering, embezzlement, mafia activities, lack of consideration for the common good. . The concrete skeletons of major projects that have remained in abeyance, the unfinished buildings, recurring scars of our time affected by socio-economic upheavals, illustrate, despite their imposing dimensions, an obvious void, and we lose sight of their primary function, the use to which the initial project dedicated them. These indefinite forms, between ruins to come and potential sculptures, draw the outlines of a strange present between dystopia and utopia, unreal, static, a piece of history over which hovers with poetry the specter of the end of a certain world. By questioning the notion of territory to build, to appropriate or to artistically redefine, Amélie Labourdette seeks to reveal the multiple layers of identities and temporalities of a landscape. She builds and realizes her photographic projects on the basis of an existing state of affairs. She uses the landscape as a reflection of history, of a sometimes bygone era, of our imagination. The opaque, dense light and the absence of shadows evoke in turn to the viewer the photography of Düsseldorf, the minimalist sculptures of the 1960s or even the monumental interventions of Land Art. We also remember the ruins of German romantic painting or the "prospective ruins" of science fiction novels, describing a post-human era where nature takes the upper hand over human constructions. This is because these “ruins”, for Amélie Labourdette, are “holes in reality”, portals, ways of accessing time itself: faced with these, we become the archaeologists of our time, like the astronaut in The Planet of the Apes, we take a retrospective look at our present, our future too. For art critic and curator Théo-Mario Coppola: “The Empire of Dust series delivers traces of an archeology of the present, with its remains, its clues, and its stories too. The artist does not fix them in order to integrate them into a catalog raisonné in the manner of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but rather chooses them to build, without claiming to be exhaustive, a set of sculptural forms. Neither does she dwell on the spectacular and its effects, also putting the immediacy of the gaze at a distance. And these pictures are not documents. Because these architectures are also captured for their strength and their physical presence, taken in a natural environment, sometimes difficult to access. They are the expression of an individual emotion, of a relation of the body to architecture, of an exploration journal ”. Exhibition from November 9 to December 23, 2017. Color photographs, signed, dated, numbered and framed. Format 115 x 135 cm. Edition of 3 or 5 depending on the images. The “Empire of Dust” photographic series was produced with the support of the State - Prefect of the Pays de la Loire region and with the support of the Pays de la Loire region and the Guichen cabinet. PRESS CONTACT: For any request (portfolio, press kit, interviews), contact Nathalie Dran (ND Communication) at 06.99.41.52.49 or by email: [email protected]