BACK TO DUST

2016 - 2024

Solo show at the photo festival of Arles 2024 at the natioinal museum of Antiques, Arles

What crosses the ages, what returns to dust? It’s this vertiginous question that Marguerite Bornhauser has placed at the heart of Back to Dust.

The series took shape during an artistic residency at the archaeological site of La Verrerie in Arles in 2016. This remarkable place, a rich labyrinth of historical layers, reveals the remains of two Roman houses from different periods, adorned with extraordinary frescoes, alongside traces of a glass factory dating back to the French Revolution. At the core of this archaeological puzzle, it was the methods of the excavators themselves that profoundly inspired the artist. As she wandered through the site, she observed the crates in which the team carefully preserved the newly unearthed fragments. Filled with black sand, these crates formed deep, dark coffers, miniature universes in which the pieces of fresco, ceramics, and painted plaster were safely kept. The image of debris suspended in blackness, like stars in the cosmos, perfectly encapsulated her own feeling of the site. It revealed a link between the immense flow of time and the tiny traces it leaves behind.

Marguerite Bornhauser plays with scale, enlarging a few-centimeter artifact against backgrounds captured under a microscope or through a telescope. This dramatic shift underscores a feeling of infinity, a shimmering galaxy made up of countless constellations. The archaeological object finds itself suspended in space, a silent witness to the ages it has crossed. Through her photographs, montages, and installations, Bornhauser invites us into a rich, intimate world of color, texture, and detail. Fragments become living entities, stars in a state of dissolution or formation, enveloped in a rain of dust, a return to infinity, back to dust.

Her solo exhibition, presented during the Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles in 2024, offered an extraordinary, sensorially rich experience. Designed in collaboration with Big Time Studio, the show plays with scale and temporality. A black chamber filled with suspended images on transparent supports and a floor covered in black sand transforms the space into a cosmic environment, a place to contemplate the stories hidden within the archaeological site. There lie traces of past worlds, the fragile legacy of human presence.

Facing the immensity of time and the vulnerability of our own existence, this work underscores the urgency to care for our planet. So that what we leave behind may become a legacy of memory, conscience, and hope. A promise that the future will be enriched by the past we pass on.