THEY MADE AMBER TEARS FLOW
 

Janvier 2019
ceramics sculptures in red clay, pine’s resina, and barks.
Pinus Strobus, white pine from America,
Photos of the ritual  performance in Meyrin, Centre des Feuillasses.

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This Tree was planted by human hands. It rises to 25 m and according to the size of its diameter more than 2m, is very old, around 400 years. Victim of Sitka Spruce Weevil it is in the end of its life : Invasion commonly due to plantations on inappropriate sites. The damage is mainly caused by larvae of the weevil that feed under the bark of the terminal arrow of the tree. Its crown is totally dead and its base too: likewise low branches were gnawed by insects.
Then humans hurry to intervene, and get rid of those deficient parts, pruning to protect healthy parts, believing that insect gangrene will not spread once the affected branches are eliminated. But each cut branch is a new injury, a gaping gateway for harmful agents. The branches size of such a large diameter weakens as much as the presence of the insect, leaving in the wood a raw wound, perfect opening for fungi and other pathogens.
With its load-bearing branches cut off and its summit parched the tree’s basic structure is precarious. Its resin oozes. The tree seems to have exhausted its resources to isolate these new wounds: he has not yet succeeded in covering injured tissues, whose surfaces are too large.

Three women come to offer to the tree a funeral ceremony.
Their presence are like will-o’-the-wisps, clear but febrile notes coming to dress and warm this tree. They are mourners announcing his death as the banshee of Irish Celtic mythology.
As the three parks, they measure his life and slice his fate. «They are the symbol of the evolution of the universe, the necessary change that controls the rhythms of life and imposes the existence and inevitability of death»
By their gestures, they celebrate its ephemeral existence, and revive its morbid state. They cremate the dead bark in three funeral urns placed on three stumps. These urns, become small furnaces where burns the material of the pine. The resin, a fossil substance when it becomes amber, will be the memory of the tree.

 

Amber as a divine matter: the tree cries amber as bright as gold, it attracts sunlight.

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with:

Tina Marchionni

Garance Raynaud

Claire Vallet

 

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