Geological garden
The project, which consists of an adapted reproduction of the Cosquer Cave, is installed in the basement of the Villa Méditerranée in Marseille. Wishing to offer to the spectators an immersive and contemplative visit, the exigency to be the most coherent and realistic possible is imposed to all the artists, sculptors and painters invited to participate in the project.
To make things even easier, the site, which represents no less than 1750 m2 of sculpted and painted surface, will have to be delivered ten months after its start. A real challenge for the company AAB, which offers me a tailor-made challenge: to be in charge of the realization of the resin speleothems and to coordinate a team of collaborators that will have to be trained.
A role and a project that cannot be refused, I will be working in the bowels of the cave for eight months.
In a preparatory phase which takes place in the Parisian suburbs, I have the task to implement and experiment different “recipes” delivered by the Ateliers Stephane Gérard, authors of a similar work in the Chauvet 2 cave. By trying various processes, I begin the implementation of different protocols to get closer to the extravagant forms that are the various stalagmites and other geological concretions of the cave. To help me, documents such as high definition photographs and 3D scans are provided to guide us.
Transparencies, colors, wet effects and scintillations are developed as we go along and are each time validated or refused by the geologists who follow and accompany our work. A long and tedious work, which requires both listening carefully to scientific explanations and understanding their rationality, while using ingenuity to be as efficient as possible while maintaining deadlines and budgets. Quality, creativity and feasibility go hand in hand. I discover products that I did not know and I find myself diverting them from their uses to obtain the right result, the one that will make the spectator believe in it.
At first it was difficult, it took me some time to get the automatisms with the products, and especially to understand the logic of the concretions, which cannot be invented. But little by little, the process starts, the gestures are affirmed and the result becomes clear. The role of the geologists who accompany the whole AAB team is essential, it allows us not to wander into aesthetic dead ends, but rather brings us back to a geological logic, essential to the desired realism.
As always, the field presents its practical reality and its difficulties to be faced.
The ease of the workshop and its equipment leaves room for the permanent adaptation necessary to the conditions present on site. In the darkness of the Villa Mediterannée’s underground, humid and moist, ventilated with large extractor fans, the resin must be shaped in the cloud of smoke from the neighbouring welders and the dust released by the sprayed concrete. Coordination is not always easy between the different stages of production. But the atmosphere remains good, like a solidarity between miners, all proud to participate in a project that exceeds us.
The work site is divided into several stages, depending on the progress of the areas that we call scales ( as for the fish). We start at the bottom to be able to take out all the machines through the front door without having to destroy the decor.
According to the plan of intervention decided by the scenography, the resin will have to cover certain zones. Then begins the long awaited application on the forms sculpted in concrete beforehand. The illusion begins to be born, the concretions with varied colors and transparencies transform the rock and sparkle in this cave giving it the aspect of a geological garden with a thousand nuances.
The research phase takes shape a few months later with the application on site of the decided protocols. The task then took on another dimension by giving the modeled and painted concrete a living and glittering appearance.
The other objective of this mission is also the direction and the training of a team to supervise in the realization of the speleothems. After having understood the different manufacturing methods, the transmission of skills and the coordination of the work are added to my role as lead artist.
Additional responsibilities, but above all a rich and intense human experience. Learning to delegate is not an easy task for me. First of all, there is the Art of transmitting, of learning, and in my case, it concerned technical skills on resin that I did not master completely, and which gave the opportunity to rich exchanges and results between all of us. Another aspect, more intimate, concerns the plastic sensibility, the approach and the gestures of each one to which one is more or less in agreement. The ego has a tendency to give bad advice, and we must learn to manage it, to be fair. Not an easy task, but an additional step in my professional evolution, in addition to an enriching personal experience. I think I can say that each of us will remember this experience with nostalgia.
A team effort, outstanding collaborators. A big thank you to: Diego, Roger, Caroline, Marine, Laure, Lucas, Fabien, Sara, the AAB team, and Kleber Roussillon.
Not long ago, I was interviewed at the Gare de Nantes by a local journalist. The journalist asked me how to best describe my contribution to the concrete tree sculpture; as an artist or an artisan? Normally, this type of question would have left me speechless, had I not thankfully prepared a very polite, very vague answer:
“we are a bit of both”