Camille Franch-Guerra

Camille was born to a Spanish father and an Italian mother in 1989. Her rich mix of cultures has developed a sensitivity to cultural syncretism as well as to the intimate, sometimes fictionalized, narratives of our societies. Through consequent projects on different territories, in China, Andalusia or Morocco, she constitutes her installations as a heterotopic space where the living, the object and the sculpture, the video or the light are as many mediums. In this ceaseless quest that she leads on the materialization of the imprint of the man, the spectator is as for him free to multiple interpretations, if it is not that, the thing, almost imperceptible could be the tuning of a symbol, of a trace, as many paradoxical vestiges of the human construction.

In the continuity of the totem series, these two works highlight a kakemphaton, a play on words between flowering, blooming (smelling a scent) and bloom (decorative ornament).

Paradoxically, for the artist, the death involves objects of rites sometimes unseemly as certain floral sprays which increase the material incongruity which accompanies the passage of the deceased. Why do hundreds of cut and pricked flowers next to it await their own death?

From ornament to pageantry, these sculptures touch on the symbolic controversy of memorial objects surrounding death. In a tension just balanced between copper tube or tin aggregate, fabric and organic materials, these sculptures are seen as a new object of mourning that forms 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 harvested are dried and reduced to dust and then rehydrated to become a fragrant and dyeing liquid. Like a processual rite, these transformed materials will serve as pictorial matter for the artist’s manipulations. This ribbon reminds the shape of the one present in the sheaves of flowers, is adorned with abstract prints made of “ashes of the living”. Hibiscus, seaweed, coal, blood, horsetail root, mother-of-pearl, flint are offered as objects of memory, nevertheless, they are the resilient signifiers of this death: the story that is created is perhaps above all a way of discussing with the one she loved so much.