Opening of “Memories”
Since Saturnday the photography exhibition “Memories” is open.
The french artist Claire Artemyz inivites to a photographic promenade in the past, from fossil world and the beginnings of human life on earth, to the early times of history. Claire Artemyz is a French artist, with a life sience background. She uses photography as a medium, to question the notion of identity and body envelope. Her images show thousands or even millions of years old objects commonly on display in several french museums with a new perspective, due to photographic teqniques like as close-up and the work on light. This way she reveals original landscapes…
The artist about “Memories”:
Among the multiple species of fossils –and new ones are constantly discovered all over the planet- some are very famous. They refer to mythic animals, which support our imagination and help us imagine what life might have been on earth, in the early times, before the occurrence of Man and during Prehistoric times.
Ammonites and dinosaurs belong to the first group: emblematic animals of the very beginnings.
They seem to have lived all over the globe, the first in the seas, the second on the ground. And they disappeared in mysterious circumstances, at about the same period. Researchers have tried for many years to understand the circumstances of dinosaurs’ extinction!
The first group of photos show various ammonites. These marine inhabitants could measure from under one centimetre in diameter to over one meter, they could also be curved or un-curved. When growing, the animal inside the shell would build another compartment, linked to the previous one by a suture. Living in the last compartment, it used the ancient ones to contain air which it used like submarines, to go up and down in the water, chasing the air through siphons (the photo “Achille’s helmet shows siphons and sutures).
The occurrence of egg enabled the new species to gain autonomy and explore the surface of the Earth.
Dinosaurs would lay many eggs, as shown in the photos “Left there”. The eggs shown in these photos never hatched, but remained trapped in their sediment, well preserved for scientists to study them and people visiting museums to admire these witnesses of a remote past, triggering our imagination!
Fossil bird and fossil egg shown here rise the usual and unsolved question: what comes first?
In the early times, over thousands of centuries, geological events gave rise to drastic climatic changes and earth major modifications, which resulted in species extinctions.
Later, the occurrence of Man also led to species extinctions, but at a much greater rate!
Aepyornis egg testifies of this regrettable phenomenon. The egg shown here (about 40 cm in its bigger dimension), belongs to one of these huge birds recently disappeared (exact period unknown, about XVIIth century, in Madagascar).It was a giant bird, 3m high, over 500kg, it eggs could weigh as much as 12kg!
Among animals living at the time of the first Homo sapiens, the mammoth is very famous and popular.
Here is shown the inside of a femur.
Carnivorous animals were one of the dangers man had to cope with.
We have here two “portraits” of skulls: one of Neanderthal Man, this extinguished specie, and the other of Cro-Magnon, our direct ancestor.
The close-up exploration of these skulls give rise to landscapes, which can be interpreted according to our imagination.
Some animals are known to use tools, but Man is the only living creature who modified deeply the stone material, and carved it to give it special shapes.
Here, we see some carved flint stones and a bronze axe.
With his tools, Man made art as shown with Venuses and, later with the “Tattooed warrior”.
We do not know anything about the use of these mysterious but highly beautiful feminine figures. A few centimetres high, they were carved from Magdalenian to Gravettian period, using mammoth ivory, bone or sometimes stone.
Quite a few were found near Grimaldi, in Italy, by Louis Alexandre Julien, between 1883-1895. They are mostly made out of green steatite. One of them, shown here, is a little head, a few cms.
Unfortunately, Man is a violent animal and some of his tools were used to kill his brothers!
As shown in the photos, Ötzi’s fate is not an isolated case!
Claire Artemyz