Born in 1989 to a Spanish father and an Italian mother. Her installations, where the living, the object, sculpture, video and light intersect, unfold across…
Born in 1989 to a Spanish father and an Italian mother. Her installations, where the living, the object, sculpture, video and light intersect, unfold across several territories, notably in China, Andalusia and Morocco. Camille was born in 1989 to a Spanish father and an Italian mother. Her rich mixed heritage has developed a sensibility to cultural syncretism as well as to the intimate, sometimes fictionalised, narratives of our societies. Through substantial projects in different territories, in China, Andalusia or Morocco, she builds her installations as a heterotopic space where the living, the object and sculpture, video or even light are so many media. In this relentless quest for the materialisation of the trace of man, the viewer is free to make multiple interpretations, except that the thing, almost imperceptible, could be the tuning-fork of a symbol, of a trace, like so many paradoxical vestiges of human construction. In the continuity of the Totem series, these two works foreground a kakemphaton, a rude pun playing on fleurir (to flower), fleurer (to smell of) and fleuron (decorative ornament). Paradoxically, for the artist, death gives rise to objects of ritual that are sometimes unseemly, such as certain floral sprays that amplify the material incongruity accompanying the passing of the deceased. Why, beside him, do hundreds of cut and pinned flowers, shaped into forms, await their own death? From ornament to apparatus, these sculptures brush against the symbolic controversy of the objects of commemoration that surround death. In a tension just barely balanced between copper tube or tin aggregate, fabric and organic matter, these sculptures are seen as a new object of mourning, forming a whole to be understood in a singular and intimate approach. These works mark a sculptural turning point in the artist’s practice. The various materials gathered here are dried and reduced to dust, then rehydrated to become a fragrant and tinctorial liquid. Like a processual rite, these transformed materials will serve as the pictorial matter for the artist’s manipulations. This ribbon, recalling that found in floral sprays, is adorned with abstract imprints made of ‘ashes of the living’. Hibiscus, seaweed, charcoal, blood, horsetail root, mother-of-pearl, flint are offered as objects of memory; nevertheless, they are the resilient signifiers of this death: the story being created is perhaps above all a way of conversing with the one she loved so much.