Guillaume Barth
"Elina"
Inhabited by a heightened awareness of impermanence, Guillaume Barth sees art as an act of celebration of the living world, an attempt to capture in form that which always is always escaping and shifting. His approach draws on the first cultures, ever attentive to their knowledge and rituals, to develop a sensitive and sacred relationship with the world. His works are far from self-sufficient or speculative, and are born out of the friction between the act of making art and the forces of the elements, human communities and profound rhythms of nature.
It is in this spirit that he envisaged a new project with the Aymara communities of Bolivia and their land, in 2013. Salar de Uyuni is known for being the largest white salt flat in the world, but it is also the planet’s biggest source of lithium, the mining of which causes rivers to run dry and damages cultures. The artist imagined a wooden hemisphere structure (made in France) that he set up on the Salar, four kilometres from the Tahua River, before covering it in two tonnes of salt bricks. It was the fruit of collective labour, created like a fragile offering to space and time.
On 5 January 2015, the Salar was miraculously covered with two centimetres of water, taking on the appearance of a giant mirror. The sphere thus revealed itself in its totality, as if suspended, weightless between heaven and Earth, subtly underscored by the fine line of the horizon connecting them. Guillaume Barth named this new planet Elina, from “Hélê”, the Greek word for sunlight, combined with the symbols Li (Lithium) and Na (Sodium), the elements in its composition. Its providential appearance was short-lived, as the water that revealed it was also the element that would soon make it disappear. Elina returned to its state of salt dissolved in water three days after appearing.
From appearance to loss, Guillaume Barth’s poetics feed on a certain persistence. The work no longer exists as a tangible object, but lives on in images, memories and relationships. The photographs exhibited at Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire testify to this lingering vision. They capture the perfection of this floating world, between reality and fiction, between the actions of man and the forces of nature.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Guillaume Barth is represented by the Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris-Lisbonne.