OCEANIA

"This work is placed under the sign of the stars. For it is a real shame that humans, city-dwellers for the most part today, are now deprived of the age-old spectacle of the heavens. (…)

But nostalgia isn’t the reason for the celestial influence under which I place this work and the exhibition based on it. My celebration of the stars pays homage to the immense astronomical knowledge of the Austronesian peoples, the ancestors of the Oceanians, who, guided by stars, on board the most sophisticated vessels ever imagined by Sapiens – pure arrangements of Nature, free from the slightest hint of metal – discovered all the archipelagos of the world’s vastest ocean.

All this, hundreds of years before our so-called 'discoverers' kicked off the very recent European colonial era, whose traces still haunt this world. As our lot, of the likes of Bougainville, Cook and Wallis, opened up maritime routes for gunpowder, the ancient cultural orality of the Oceanians found itself relegated to the status of prehistory, whose protagonists were mostly a band of animist man-eating savages."

Extract from L'Errance et le Divers, 2018, Éditions Gallimard