The earth carries us

With this series, Christelle Westphal invents the earthly ritual of portraiture. Each person passes on a plant headdress, not always the same, yet similar. This headdress is both root and branch. Tree roots exist in the sky, and branches and roots are one and the same. One cannot exist without the other ; we cannot exist without them.

At the crossroads of sculpture, photography and video, this series “re-introduces” the hand into the photographic image, the hand that traces its manufacture, the hand that wears the headdress to place it on its receptacle : our head, as shown by the marvellous, frenzied gaze in the Port Rex video. This headdress, necessarily handcrafted, along with the film Ebor Eénipop breathes travel, evokes the links between work, clothing, landscape and the human.

The earth carries us and we carry the earth, and these works reaffirm our presence in the earth, reintroducing us to the world : the real world. Man, language and the world are the fruits of the construction of a symbiosis based on action-retroactions. These With this headdress, we nourish the earth, our relationship with verticality and our relationship with the sky. It links us to living together. Living with nature and living with others are intimately linked. Like ivy, it makes us the roots of the earth. Far from reducing us to a vegetal person ; anchoring us in the earth, this headdress transforms us into earth-terrestrials, humanizing us, connecting us to life.

With this headdress, we nourish the earth, our relationship with verticality and our relationship with the sky. It links us to living together. Living with nature and living with others are intimately linked. Like ivy, it makes us the roots of the earth. Far from reducing us to a vegetal person ; anchoring us in the earth, this headdress transforms us into earth-terrestrials, humanizing us and connecting us to life.

A series is not the repetition of the same thing. Christelle Westphal reinforces this assertion through the technical simplicity of her work, the simplicity of her staging and, by or because of the participation of the photographed subject. The trace of photography, the imprint of video.

Our Earth in Heaven

To be born cobbed, in spite of, in spite of the Anthropocene.
Connected to earth and sky,
In green and against all,
The rockery of absorbed vegetation.

A plant headdress, a lark’s mirror of resemblance,
An atonal mirror in the silence of a maritime cathedral.
The removal of the headdress in the field of indifference.
The sacred sacredness of plants.
The bond of ivy, the ivy of the bond
of plants and humans.

© Hervé Bernard 2024