ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
There’s a sublime tension in mining landscapes. On the one hand, they highlight the way humans disfigure the land, leaving an indelible imprint. On the other, they reveal the fascinating underground geology of the land. These landscapes accompanied my childhood and fed my imagination in the south of France, in a former bauxite mining area. A territory punctuated by gaping holes in the hillsides, like immeasurable open wounds abandoned to slow erosion. So, in 2019, I began a plastic research project on mining sites in order to think about these characteristic landscapes of the Anthropocene. However, the challenge of this research is not only to point out the monumental traces of mining operations, but also to take advantage of this motif to engage in a reflection on the photographic medium. Indeed, this study, which reveals the stratified composition of the ground, resonates with a reflection on the structure of the photographic image, on its material and temporal thickness, as if to point to the possibility of the “infra-thin”. This time-lapse image, shot in Spain in an open-cast copper mine, exploits the trichromatic process - which consists in reconstructing a color photograph from three black-and-white shots that have been filtered respectively in red, green and blue. This technique of color separation generates vibratory effects and accidents due to the time lag between each photograph, which tend to blur the reading of the image and reveal a temporality that moves away from the decisive moment. Finally, the choice of this obsolete and time-consuming process, in the age of digital image-flux, is also explained by a desire to take a step aside and measure the physical and temporal dimensions of a world undergoing profound change.
BIOGRAPHY
Terence Pique was born in 1983 in the south of France. He lives in Ile-de-France and works between France and Spain. After studying cinema, he decided to go into photography, completing the Master Pro Photographie at the Université Paris VIII. At the end of his studies, he moved to Spain, where he took an interest in territories under pressure, such as the intensive greenhouse farming zone near Almeria; the border area around Gibraltar; and real estate speculation on the outskirts of Madrid. Following this rich experience, during which he took part in several artistic residencies, he returned to Ile-de-France to devote himself to teaching the visual arts, while continuing his artistic research and his travels to Spain.