Last snow

Candles cast in eternal snows

Territorial narrative built through objects

Snow is a material boundary. It delimits a kind of homeland. Wherever the snow falls, the geography, the recognisable marks of a territory are erased, smoothed out, whitened. Snow proposes a complete recomposition. Its borders rise and fall: it's a territory in motion. In the memoryless white, space reigns alone. History leaves no trace, and whiteness defends the homeland of emptiness.Snow expert Robert Bolognesi has this to say about this substance: "We get the raw material from the sky, and then we make a product that we call the slope."
Some people refer to snow as white gold. There is a one-sided model
maintained with snow, this material on the edge between the real and the marvellous.

If you go further up, beyond its shifting borders. You come across the so-called eternal snows.They are not really, because they are constantly regenerating. But the place where they are found, the snow level, implies that they do not disappear.
What the ancients called eternal snows would have been given a different adjective if it had been called what it is today.
When the snow melts, where does the white go? asked Shakespeare.
Why this metamorphosis of order? asked Sylvain Tesson.

Snow is one of the most poetic of materials, or rather states of matter. Nothing guarantees its return. To pay homage to this living substance, I went to cast candles in the so called eternal snows. Candles symbolise life, purity and innocence since ancient Greece. By moulding this wax in the snow, I take its imprint. The imprint of a world that will disappear.



The anthropologist Tim Ingold said: "one of the things we want to do is go back to matter, to substance, to observe the different ways in which materials come together and what that can tell us, in itself, without having to extrapolate to find meaning.”