The motivation behind this project is to reverse the way we view forests and wood as a material. Through the exhibition of Œillarbres cut from trunks and planks found in our sawmills, trees become our audience. We are not visiting an exhibition subject to our subjective gaze; rather, it is the works that are looking at us objectively.
By becoming aesthetic subjects highlighted by the artist, they are now the ones observing and challenging us, seducing us with their beauty and questioning us with their fragility. They put us in our place, which is not at the centre, but alongside their existence within the whole of living beings in all their diversity, which makes life on Earth possible.
They command us and remind us of the urgency of respecting them as wise old beings that have taken decades or centuries to flourish. It is truly time for them to rise up against their destruction.
The savage is not the forest where one gets lost at nightfall; it is the person who uses the forest as a mere resource to be exploited without recognising its sacred nature in the chain of life and the beauty of the world. The savages are us, whom the bewildered Œillarbres look upon: our disoriented human societies.
Defenseless and without hatred, they witness our downfall as a supposedly advanced civilisation. They constantly question us about the fate we have in store for them in the modern world.
In the Amazon, as everywhere else, deforestation is accelerating: this madness of the present times of overexploitation is precipitating the collapse of biodiversity and making the sixth extinction a reality.
We must look at and understand the message of the Œillarbres as paragons of our survival…
Three modes of project exposure are envisaged:
- In a forest, park or remarkable garden: Scatter hundreds of Œillarbres to be discovered during a walk, or group them together so that visitors find themselves immersed in a plant atrium populated by the gaze of the trees.
- Indoors: Exhibition of around a hundred natural Œillarbres, finely sanded and treated naturally.
- Outdoors in public spaces: Printing of photos of the most striking Œillarbres. Exhibition of around twenty large panels.
