ARCHEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE - EXHIBITIONS Culture Station Seoul 284 - SeMA NANJI
"Scales of leaves" - Archeology of the Future
60 cm x 650 cm, Porcelain, 2017
View Culture Station Seoul 284 & SeMA Nanji exhibitions
One day in the future, the human kind will excavate these porcelain pieces and archaeologists will delicately reconstitute these fragments. If we join these pieces like snake skin or ginkgo tree leaves, what would we see? Are we sure that the long body we see unfold before us is its original form? Our imagination plays an important role in reconstituting archeological findings. The shattered unite into one through our imagination and their similarities and differences become criteria and indicator. However, these sculptures that desire to be discovered as artifacts are, already from the beginning, disassembled imperfectness with no use or function. And the artist herself intervenes in this imperfectness by intentionally carrying out a process which violates the normal ceramic production method.
Elodie DdR takes out the ceramic works from the kiln during firing in order to create natural cracks like leaf veins, and chooses to leave such imperfections as they are just like in Japanese Kintsuki (金継ぎ) which emphasizes the repairs in ceramics by applying powdered gold. She talks to us about the delicacy of this world, and its extinction and destruction in various ways. Rather than uttering her messages by analytically amplifying them, she leaves her audience with the fragments of narratives and the rooms of such fragments. Now, we’re left with just questions. What narratives will we make with these discontinuous remains? What will we think about? What narrative fragments lie behind the doors that are not yet open? These are the questions I ask, filled with curiosity, as I stand at a fork of numerous corridors, looking inside the open doors.