Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte Nature morte

For Tactical Specters, Lorraine de Sagazan and Anouk Maugein embark on an investigation of decomposition and the obscene, and present an installation entitled Nature Morte (2025), consisting of a film, a pile of earth inhabited by seedlings and an assemblage of organic materials abandoned to their own degradation. In this evolving work, the absence of any controllable finality is assumed as an exercise in passive contemplation. Contrary to a productivist approach to art and Descartes’ idea that we must become “masters and possessors of nature”, the decline of this cornucopia into a repulsive, putrefied form balances a proposition between disgust and fascination. The work also reminds us that it is through putrescence that the fundamental principle of living transformation takes place. Like a moon rising over a landscape, the accompanying video explores the territories and reliefs of a mold that has become pictorial.”

“The dead still have their say and their share of the work to do. By delegation, of course, but they are present because they are well represented.”

• Vinciane Despret, in her book Les mort à l’œuvre.

How do the dead insist, through time, on keeping us in question? The voice of the dead occupies a central place in contemporary artistic, literary, dramaturgical and philosophical reflection, particularly among artists who articulate diasporic, transcultural or minority affiliations. Centered around the notion of hauntology, to quote the neologism coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Spectres de Marx, this project aims to present works or interventions that carry within them voices from the past. Through them are expressed the irreconcilable contradictions we have inherited: from the mirages of modernity to the ashes of the colonial continuum. If there is only a troubled present, fraught with complexities, in which we navigate, the practices of ancestrality or genealogy teach us how to build affective and intellectual lineages through time, and enter into conversation with the spectres that surround us.