(Art)efacts

Groupama Paris Val de Loire and its Oise Federation have had the pleasure to sustain the
collaborative project from the Archeological museum of Oise and the Polymorf’ artistry
collective of publishing a catalogue for the exhibition Passé recomposé (11th February – 30th
november 2017), which mixes archeology and contemporary art. Supporting this enterprise
emerging from two cultural actors of the territory, is to simply promote the local cultural
heritage and in particular its archeological gem : the antique site of Vendeuil-Caply.
 
Indeed the booklet (Art)efacts sets forth archeological objects which are conserved in the
collections of the Archeological museum of Oise, but Florent Perris’ eye and photographic
technic shows them under a new light, that of lightpainting.
 
To do so, he immerged himself in the darkness with these old items and reinterpreted them
using lights and videomapping.
The result is sometimes uncanny, sometimes striking. Either way, these photographs doesn’t
let you indifferent and here lays all the artist’s approach : play with codes and shows artefacts
in an unconventional way.
 
The photographics reinterpretations from Florent Perris are accompanied by Alain Patetta’s
texts who delivers here his vision of archeology. The latter is indeed quite personnal and
presented all along a pleasant writing which reminds each and everyone of us that our
existence is punctuated by recurrences of the Antiquity and that the vestiges of the past are
omnipresents in our environment. Sometimes it just takes a glance around ourselves to realise
that the past still lives inside our present.
 
Adrien Bossard – Cultural heritage curator