THREE NATURAL HISTORIES
Léa Bismuth

You have to imagine entering an open-air exhibition in a space open to living things and to the infinite fluidity of natural move- ment. We come face to face with different species in an immersion between kingdoms. This is access opened to living beings in a qualified and set manner, not to gain a hold on what is natural but in contrast to enter a dialogue in awareness with nature itself—as a complex concept. Here, nature is a tangible reality that we can move about in and bring in resonance with other fields: botany, zoopoetry and mineralogy, thus forming three natural histories, three stories, and three unities of works.

BOTANY
At the very beginning of the exhibition on the ground floor of the Musée Ziem, Coupoles (‘cupolas’) are displayed. They were made in 2012 with leaves of Elaeagnus, a genus of small bushy evergreen shrubs. The leaves have one silvery side and remain practically intact in time. Looking at the hemispherical cupolas from above reveals a certain brightness in their hollows. Scattered, they are like cups containing an offering placed on the floor. To describe what hap- pens we talk in terms of familiar materialism fed by a way of appropriating nature at our scale. Visitors can thus interact with the work that itself participates in a much broader approach. The familiar materialism involved operates not on but with living beings. And the artist can thus go into the street or walk through wasteland to find inspiration and substance for plastic transformation.
This is the approach used, remaining atten- tive to the beauties of nature and faithful to the curiosity of untiring botanists. A leaf of Monstera deliciosa collected at the Botanical Garden in Strasbourg became an engraving. All its ribs gained a graphic dimension as this leaf with all its aesthetic complexity became a design stamped on aluminium. For this, the artist worked with a coachbuilder specialised in sheet metal-formwork1. She made the leaf at the scale of the human body using the tools used in metal formwork. For us the plant is also a subject for ceaseless aesthetic astonishment with each rib becoming a plastic, almost eternal incarnation. It is by contact, as understood for the beginnings of photography, that these ribs leave their print on the metal plate. So perhaps the trace of a leaf of Monstera deliciosa should be kept as a relic. Looking at it, I think of botany and in particular of Francis Hallé who has combed primary tropical forests since the 1960s to make an inventory of the species that grow there in a gigantic atlas of families created first using sketches and then extremely precise drawings.
We can mention here a discussion with Hallé in the context of the exhibition ‘Nous les arbres’ (Trees) held in 2019-2020 at the Cartier Foundation. In a short extract he talks about his botanical work as an infinite human science2. He considers that it is cer- tainly not ‘pinning’ species as an entomolo- gist would do but rather living in tune with nature and understanding it closely in order to communicate with it. Here he talks of the distinction to be made between the artist—who can interpret nature and make it his own, for example by forging a bond between a leaf of a tree and an aluminium plate—and the botanist whose duty is sim- ply to respect what he sees to pass on the descriptions to future generations. Botanists also describe species that are becoming extinct. Hallé has worked meticulously for years on this study, continuing an ancient activity. He also reminds us that looking at living beings is a formidable tool and an otherness that is both fundamental for humans but also a foundation for possi- ble communication between human and non-human. He stresses the boundless discretion of trees that ask for nothing and grow according to their own laws. We must adopt this discretion by proposing condi- tions for their survival or by at least making an effort not to harm them. Although bio- diversity is so vast that we will certainly not have the time to discover everything that it has to say—especially at a time when it is under threat—it is still up to us to traverse it without destroying it.
Léa Barbazanges is a botanist in her own way because collection is at the heart of her approach. She thus seeks to draw attention to what grows, lives and surrounds us during our daily lives without us being aware of this. Whether she collects dust from a comet to depict it using oil pastel and dry chalk (in the work Poussière de comète de la mission spatiale Stardust, 2015) or several thousand dandelion seed plumes (3,700 in all!) to make a work with a living volume, she ceaselessly invites us to respect the move- ment of life. And this respect operates from its stellar origins to our most precarious little gardens. The dandelion plumes collected by the artist are attached by achenes, inde- hiscent fruits, i.e. that are able to open to release their seeds. Dandelion achenes have the feature of bearing pappus, the small plume of fibres that we blow on to make our dreams come true. The wind disperses the plumes, which can travel extremely long distances, flying and then multiplying. We talk in terms of dispersion—when a plant species becomes scattered. Might nature have intelligence? The discussion is still open among philosophers and sci- entists, but this intelligence must be qual- ified in plant and not cerebral terms. It is a question of specific life, a form of life that uses its means and fantastic capacities for development.
The major issue here is an artistic form of pollination. This will have resonance for all those who look at the magnificent picture of plumes. By making a hybrid of kingdoms—and by awarding a clearly pic- torial dimension to these dandelions—the artist has developed an art of weaving and makes her harvest a live source for the work. So let’s blow joyfully on these dandelions to change our viewpoint and finally rehabilitate species that have been forgotten or trampled on too many times. It is doubtless essential now to set a scenario for the possible to make thinking change and outline ecology as a study of environ- ments. This artistic ecology also places powerfully into perspective the relation between the beings in these environments. Here, Léa Barbazanges does precisely what Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire wrote in Terra forma: she opens up ‘this inter-biome zone, an area of life that includes micro-resources hidden in the interstices of daily life 3’.

ZOOPOETRY
Insects and animals also have something to say. Flies first of all. In 2005, Léa Barbazanges made Page d’ailes, consisting of wings (ailes) of Calliphora vicina flies. This very common species is also called the bluebottle or blow- fly. These flies arouse disgust because of their meat-loving, necrophilic or scatopha- gous features and brushed away by people’s hands. But the artist makes a reminder: ety- mologically, Calliphora also means ‘bearer of beauty’. She takes some of these insects to make a small picture or a page of writing. Is it a kind of ex-voto or an extremely pre- cious reliquary but nonetheless made from almost nothing? Art is meditative here as the wings were assembled by hand—between each other and side to side during several long months of concentration. This created a dreamlike swarming landscape ‘as if the arrangement of the wings were a reminder of the frontal part of the fly’ observes the artist. Looking at this writing on an A4 page imme- diately leads to thinking of Robert Walser’s ‘microscripts4’ whose typographical signs are so small that they seem practically undeci- pherable by the naked eye. Writing with the invisible then: people the blank page with signs. Make a page of wings and return a degree of flight to the poem.
The minds of Jacques Derrida (L’Animal que donc je suis), Jean-Christophe Bailly (Le Parti pris des animaux) and also Élisabeth de Fontenay (Le Silence des bêtes) show this attention paid to animals interrelating with humans: the human looks at the ani- mal which in turn looks at the human in a reciprocal phenomenology. This is what the philosopher Anne Simon calls ‘zoopoetics5’, that is to say a literary approach based on closer contact between human and social sciences and life sciences, aiming at stressing ‘emphasis on the richness of the interactions between humans, other animals, plants, the atmosphere or minerals and attempting here to break down the Western category of ‘kingdoms’ that are distinct from each other and considered as being ‘natural’6. In imaging zoopoetics for this Page d’ailes, I think immediately of the manner in which Marguerite Duras describes the death of a fly in her book Écrire:
‘It was long. It struggled against death. It lasted for perhaps ten to fifteen minutes and then stopped. Life must have ceased. I stayed to see more. The fly stayed against the wall as I had seen it, as if bonded to it. I was wrong. It was still alive. I stayed to watch it in the hope that it would start to hope, to live. My presence made this death even worse. I knew that and I stayed. To see. To see how death would gradually invade the fly. And also to try to see where this death came from. From outside or from the depth of the wall or from the floor. From what night did it come, from the land or the sky, from the nearby forests or from a still unmentionable nothingness, very close perhaps, to me who tried to trace the trajectories of the fly in the process of entering eternity7.’
This description is so intense that all of us can say that we have never known how to observe the death of a fly: Duras gives no anatomical details but nonetheless seems to understand from inside the physiological phenomena taking place within the tiny body of the insect. She is the horrified mes- senger. What affects her and what affects us when we read this is that the death of the fly is nothing and of no importance for anybody. What is a death that is of no impor- tance? A death that nobody mentions. Page d’ailes awards eternity to the wings of flies that have disappeared. The page becomes a choreographic mass of absent bodies with perfect contours.
From flies, Léa Barbazanges goes to pigs, with an installation made using an assembly of several cauls. A caul is the membrane that encloses the viscera of the animal; it is very fine and transparent with milky notes. Here again, a little like the ribs of a large tropical leaf, the network of veins display magisterial arborescence in a natural layout, perfectly coralline. The work is hung and plays on its lightness, like a moving sail. We no longer see fat but an aquatic, ramified landscape. The artist’s work therefore consists of knowing how to pay attention to minuscule things, to show the minute while making it possi- ble to reveal its natural beauty and formal perfection.

MINERALOGY
Léa Barbazanges uses the motif to reveal the invisible. We thus understand why she can make concerted use of both pig caul and crystals. Indeed, take the work Cristaux – ennéagone (2010-2020) that formally refers
to the pork caul installation: both share a certain monumentality and bright trans- parency. She made it using calcite crystals. The dimensions chosen were like those of a door— 2.10 metres by 90 centimetres— and for the artist are an invitation to travel. We have to go through this door to enter a world that is both nocturnal and light, a kind of reassuring cave.
If Léa Barbazanges is interested in crystals, it is because they are minerals that obey a special regular and mathematic layout. This is when the artist becomes a crystallographer. The work Ligne de mica—made specially for the exhibition at the Musée Ziem in 2021—is in the form of a line 14 metres long. ‘Mica is very present around us, in nature. It is what can be seen shining in sand or pebbles’ says the artist who plays here on the shimmer- ing colours and their sparkle. The stones are made thin and laid out in sequences that are repetitive but never totally iden- tical. In 2019, Léa Barbazanges had carried out experiments with Sylvain Ravy, a CNRS researcher, for MicaPenrose in which the mica was worked for its brilliance and optical prop- erties but amplified to show a complex motif likely to be marvelled at for its structure. The artist appropriated the undulation of light by breaking it down like a soap bubble.
This trip made up of three natural histories takes us into an encyclopaedia in move- ment—consisting of creative freedom, atten- tion to forms and species and above all their potential. While Léa Barbazanges can find sources of inspiration in the sciences, she is nonetheless a poet, that is to say able to make forms say what they generally keep silent.
Léa Bismuth


Léa Bismuth is an art critic and freelance exhibition curator. She is currently working on a doctorate entitled ‘Ecrire : un passage à l’acte’ (‘Writing: get- ting it out’) at EHESS, Paris. She is also preparing an exhibition devoted to the emancipatory modes of our forms of life.


1. The person was Isaak Rensing of the coach-builders HH Services in Strasbourg.
2. See the online video: Francis Hallé, Web-série Nous les arbres, épisode 1/5, Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63F1se_d9KE.
3. Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire, Terra forma. Manuel de cartographies potentielles, Paris, Éditions B42, 2019, p. 154.
4. Mention can be made
of the exhibition ‘Robert Walser: Grosse kleine Welt. Grand petit monde’ at Les Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2018- 2019.
5. I refer to the book by Anne Simon published recently: Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique, Marseille, Wildproject, coll. ‘Tête nue’, 2021.
6. Anne Simon, ‘Présentation de la zoopoétique’, Animots. Carnet de zoopoétique, s. d., https://animots.hypotheses.org/ zoopoetique.
7. Marguerite Duras, Écrire, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, coll. « Folio », 1993, p. 39.

MicaPenrose
How atoms are arranged in quasicrystals

This project is a collaboration between an artist and a scientist, Sylvain Ravy is solid state physicist, director of research at CNRS. We have started this project thanks to Diagonale Paris Saclay's grant, and produce the serie thanks to the Region Grand Est's grant.

The project is made from a natural material : mica, which is a translucent mineral.

How do the colours appear?
Thanks to a physical phenomena called birefringence, “mica”, the natural translucent mineral, takes bright coulours which change when we move around the artefact by means of light filters. The physical principle involved in this project is iridescence. Mica, the material of our artwork, is birefringent : it makes the direction of light rotate according to the color and the width of the mica.

What is the drawing about?
Our project represents how do the atomes are arranged in quasicrystal.
In 1982, a team of 4 international scientist discovered an aluminium alloy which did not exhibit the property of crystals. It was ordered like crystals but not periodic : these are quasicrystals. This discovery led to the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize. Denis Gratias, who took part of this discovery helped us on this project. The Penrose tiling is the archetype of quasicrystals. It exhibits five-fold symmetry : it remains the same after a one-fifth turn.

Penrose tilings are made of just two tiles, arranged in a very special way which is used to model the atomic structure of quasicrystals. That's what Denis Gratias gave to us, but a special one which have never been used nor even seen before our project.

The artwork drawing is made from only two shapes arranged like atoms are, in quasicrystal. These two tiles are an oblate and a prolate rhombus. And amazingly, the golden ratio is present everywhere in quasicrystals. That's because of the angle 36 degree. This arrangement create an endless tesselation which is never the same.

Innovative and surprising, this project created by a scientist and an artist aims at arousing fascination of the viewer by the shimmering colors of the tesselation, in order to explain science by beauty.

In her work, Léa Barbazanges reconnects with the most archaic instincts of art, with early humans’ fascination with curios - those organic objects (fossils, minerals, shells…) that they collected because of their unusual form or how shiny they were and then safely stored away in caves. Léa Barbazanges is curious, in the strong sense of the term, meaning being both fascinated and caring. She works on their materiality to create sculptures and “organic aggregates” which intensify nature’s plasticity. Her work is both inspired by physical (accumulation, crystallization…) and artistic (drawing, collage, cutting…) processes and feeds a biomorphic imaginary world resulting in specific shapes influencing the living world. The same then can be said of the curiosity driving her and of the aesthetic effect produced by her work : the contemplative encounter with the « organic otherworldliness », to quote Roger Caillois, acts as a powerful stimulant for the imagination by experiencing, and maybe reinventing, man's relationship with life. (...)

Sculptures or installations, I call my work « organic assemblies ». The visual language is simple: threads or surfaces, made from assemblies. The refinement of the material itself is at the centre of my thoughts.

The material is chosen for its beauty, ordinary yet remarkable, and for how it reminds us of life's fragility. Each piece is an attempt to make last the ephemeral. These pieces of reality are sometimes so fine, that my method consists of finding the right manner in which to exhibit them. This is the meaning of my method.

The work starts by collecting meticulously. The chosen materials are principally organic (vegetable or animal origins), or of mineral origin, products of an everyday nature, often urban. I am particularly fascinated by materials when they are translucent, shiny, fragile or with miniscule details.

The pleasure of manipulating these materials whilst observing them close-up creates a desire to exhibit them. Each meeting with a new material is a new challenge, the respect and the understanding of the material’s unique properties always allows us to go further than we would imagine. By a process of careful conservation, without addition of other matter, each of my works is an attempt to make last the ephemeral.

The ensemble of my work is a poetic take upon global environmental questions. The installation of my works invites the viewer to take the risk of approaching them in spite of their fragility. On one hand a minute and repetitive gesture gives a human scale to materials too small to be seen in our daily life. On the other hand, the installation of the piece in dialogue with its surroundings captures the attention of the viewer and incites them to look closely and identify the nature of the material used.

My goal is to bring a new regard to what we are too accustomed to seeing.

Léa Barbazanges was born in 1985 in Rennes. She lives and works in Strasbourg. She is a graduate of the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg and gained her Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique in 2009.

Her work has featured in solo exhibitions, such as Fils de cristal at the Galerie des Projets in 2008 and Filandre at Espace Insight in 2009 (both in Strasbourg). She has also taken part in group exhibitions, including N’oublions pas que le vertige se prend sur les hauteurs at the Kunsthalle de Mulhouse (2010), Strasbourg, capitale du verre at the Hôtel du Département (Strasbourg) and Au fil des araignées at the Natural History Museum.

In 2013 she was one of 70 emerging artists to take part in the 58th Salon d’Art Contemporain de Montrouge. The following year, she took up a residency in South Korea. In 2014, she also presented her work at Domaine Pommery (Reims) as part of Expérience Pommery #12 exhibition. In 2016 and 2017, she took part in the Drawing Now Art Fair at the Carreau du Temple in Paris. A graduate of the Institut Français’ “Hors les Murs” programme, she undertook an artist’s residency in Satka in Russia in July 2017.

In 2018, she participated in the group exhibition L’impermanence at the Fondation Fernet-Branca in Saint-Louis (Alsace) and also in Voyage à Nantes with Particules. In November 2019, she contributed to the Festival Arts et Sciences CURIOSITas organised by the Université Paris-Saclay in Massy, in collaboration with Sylvain Ravy, diector of the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides of the Université Paris-Sud and researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). In 2020, she will be in residence at the Château de Monbazillac and will hold an exhibition in the Halle aux Sucres in Dunkirk.

Exhibition March 22nd to April 26th, 2014
Opening Saturday, March 22nd, starting at 3 pm
The Xippas Gallery is happy to present the first ever gallery show of Léa Barbazanges’s artwork.

This young artist, born in 1985, was discovered during the 58th Salon de Montrouge (2013) and has shown her work in several institutions in France and abroad (principally in Switzerland and Germany) since 2007.
Léa Barbazanges is a forager and a curious investigator. She is attentive to the environment and endeavors to gather materials of mineral and organic origin (both vegetal and animal). Léa Barbazanges’s artworks employ a vocabulary which she terms “organic assemblings” and which includes suspends gold leaves, crystals, white marble, dandelions seeds, spiderwebs, clementine pith, and Elaeagnus leaves. For her, each encounter with these materials is experienced as a new challenge. The artist must first understand the substance, discover how to manipulate it, and then brainstorm the appropriate shape, in order to reveal the hidden properties that were previously invisible to us.

While looking at these artworks, the spectator is confronted with fragments of reality that he has never seen before. The artist has enhanced reality by experimenting with its elements in an attempt to move beyond its limits and render the graphics extraordinary without any help from artifice. The rectangle of fly wings plays with transparency, the clementine pith forms an abstract drawing, the Elaeagnus leaves create wells of light, and the crystals brilliantly reflect light, which changes according to the source. The beauty of her work resides in the fragility of her works: a mere touch threatens them with disappearance. By attempting to render these ephemeral materials stable, Léa Barbazanges invites us to see the power within instability. There is nothing theatrical in these domestic artworks, no staging, nothing but a simple stand, which is always minimal and discrete and which allows the artwork to be shown. In her works, the spectacular reveals the extraordinariness of her process.

The strikingly beautiful and transparent Paroi de crépines was produced on sight in the final room of the exhibition and is a large ephemeral work that contrasts with most of the other pieces. This material that normally repels us becomes a translucent canvas fashioned from a fascinating network and it push us to question the way we look at the world around us. Moving beyond the question of the relationship between art and nature, Léa Barbazanges’s works must be approached, looked at, contemplated, and appreciated for their infinite fragility that they reveal.

Flies’ wings, crystal threads, spider setae, dandelion plumes, white marble, strainer, tube worms, copper plate, shrub leaves, gold leaf... the list of materials used by Léa Barbazanges for her sculpture already says much about her practice, her aesthetic orientations, her possible heritage and attention to the richness of materials. As the artist says: “The material is chosen for its beauty, banal but remarkable, and for what it recalls about the fragility of life.”(1) I would add, at the risk of contradicting the artist, that this beauty is not so banal and that although cer- tain material easily attracts the eye – spiders’ webs or dandelion plumes, others are more rare and less easily submitted to childlike fascination – because I suppose that some of this remains in this practice as much for the artist as for the viewer – such as a strainer, tube worms and disentangled crystal.


Next come the manipulation and the search for a process which would allow them to be seen, to make their qualities visible, the search for a shaping, what would allow these materials to be transformed into sculptures while preserving their intrinsic qualities or magnifying them. The flies’ wings can be stuck edge to edge on a surface or assembled behind each other to constitute a thread like the dandelion plumes, the carbon black can be suspended in the form of an aggregate from the spider’s threads, the silk thread can be unrolled on a glass spool, the marble buffed until nothing but a translucent sheet is left, the strainer can form a suspended web, the copper plate be pierced and milled until it repeats the spidery network of the veins of a leaf... Each process is simple and favours the material almost without the addition of another – if not sometimes of a support allowing it to be held in space: frame or plaque for example.


The result is a sculpture often – almost always – hard to see for the over rushed viewer, with a discrete presence, almost tenuous, requiring us to approach to see, that we move close, very close to see the material finally revealed, reveal itself, be revealed not only as the shaping of it dramatizes it, takes account of its richness, but increases its qualities, transforms the natural material into an artistic material. The veins – whether of animal or vegetable origin – become a draw- ing in space, a plume metamorphoses into a trimmed line, a glass plaque covered in crystals is transformed into a pictorial surface with spectacular iridescence and if the viewer is initially struck by the fragility of the material, what then captures him is indeed that, in this fragility, the power of a form is also present.

In collaboration with Sylvain Ravy, researcher at CNRS, "MicaPenrose" represents the structure of a quasicrystal but is made up of mica tiles, a periodic crystal. This is the mineral that sparkles amongst sand and shingle. The colours, taken from the palette of soap bubbles, are thanks to the optical properties of mica and they change depending on the position of the viewer. When viewed from the side, the natural colour of the mineral appears. The pattern - Penrose tiling - is the model of an atomic structure of quasicrystal made from aluminium alloy, the discovery of which was rewarded with a Nobel prize in Chemistry (2011). The frame of "MicaPenrose" is made from this aluminium alloy. The discovery of this quasicrystal turned the scientific ideas of the time, regarding the material structure, on their heads.

Project developed with Sylvain Ravy, researcher at CNRS, with support from Diagonale Paris-Saclay, the Région Grand Est and with the expertise of Denis Gratias, l’Académie des Sciences member.

Léa Barbazanges was born in 1985 in Rennes. She lives and works in Strasbourg. She graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 2009. Her work has been displayed in private exhibitions, such as the Galerie Xippas in Paris (2014) and in the Ekaterinbourg art centre in Russia (2017). She has also participated in collective exhibitions, such as N’oublions pas que le vertige se prend sur les hauteurs at Kunsthalle de Mullhouse (2010), Au fil des araignées at the Natural History Museum in Paris, and also the Hurrle Museum in Durbach, Germany.

In 2013 she was one of 70 emerging artists to take part in the 58th Salon d’Art Contemporain (Contemporary Art Fair) de Montrouge. The following year, she took up a residency in South Korea. In 2014, she also presented her work at the Domain Pommery (Reims) in l’Expérience Pommery #12. In 2016 and 2017, she took part in the Drawing Now Art Fair at the Carreau du Temple in Paris and was also at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. A graduate of the Institut Français’ “Hors les Murs” programme, she undertook an artist’s residency in Satka in Russia in July 2017.

In 2018, she was part of the collective exhibition L’impermanence at the Fondation Fernet-Branca in Saint-Louis (Alsace), as well as participating in the Voyage à Nantes with Particules, and the second season of the Les Tanneries centre for contemporary art in Amilly.

In November 2019, she displayed her work in collaboration with Sylvain Ravy, director of the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides at the Université́ Paris-sud and researcher at CNRS, at the Festival Arts et Sciences CURIOSITas organised by the Université Paris-Saclay in Massy. In 2020, she will undertake a residency at the Château de Monbazillac and exhibit her work, by invitation of COAL, at the Halle aux Sucres in Dunkirk. Her work will be presented in the L'œil de Huysmans: Manet, Degas, Moreau exhibition at the Musée d'Art.