In an Oxbow lake, everything is slowed down. Waves have assembled sediments; glass fragments
found been melted together — a multitude of realities compressed in one “fluid” object — turned to
“stones” with spectral meanings. The fluid shapes a moment where matter is suspended in time — an
undef place. Objects have been unmapped and act as ghosts — oblivion data. How to welcome
unknowness/unknown entities by embracing them?
Antoine Félix Bürcher’s work is presented as an exploration of a post-digital world in which the images
of our screens haunt the earth; an archaeology of traces where different temporalities and multiple
narratives merge. For A place for remembrance the artist collected fragments of glass from different
contexts on a daily basis and assembled them into sculptural objects - a multitude of realities found in
mirrors, windows, computer screens, bottles are compressed into a fluid object and transformed into
fossil stones with spectral meanings. These objects take us to that moment after the catastrophe,
when humanity exists only in its traces - the cables and objects that once organised the bodies are
located in an Oxbow lake. Over time, the latter has become detached from the main bed at a speed
slowed by the accumulation of sediments until time stands still. The objects, separated from the main
flow, stop there and are no longer mapped - unmapped. They act as ghosts in a traumatic space; data
of oblivion - undef. The glass of these drifting sculptures is a paradoxical material; delimiting bodies in
architecture and everyday life, it is situated in the porosity of the limits between the visible and the
invisible, the fragile and the solid, the living and the non-living, like a ghost. In the Oxbow lake it is
opaque, like a surreal moment when the interface becomes an object. The time that is frozen there,
suspended and recorded in the materiality of the sculptures, is familiar to us. It is the indefinable
present time of an unimaginable future that haunts a present, itself marked by the weight of a past.
What is the imaginary possible in the wall we are facing? What form will the rebirth of bodies that
have become matter again take? In fossils of the future acting as memory clusters, Antoine Félix
Bürcher imposes an unknown to reflect on our relationship to reality.
Computer language as concepts :
- undef or undefined : “undefined property indicates that a variable has not been assigned a value, or
not declared at all.” A place that has not been defined yet. Opening a place for ambiguous meanings
by embracing unknowns — undef.
- unmap : an action. It is used to remove metadata’s (metadata is : “for a document might include a
collection of information like the author, file size,...”), to unmap a document : to remove its metadata’s.
Without its
metadata, the document can be undef.