Consulting the archives of TAMAT's conservator-restorer, I found many silver photographs describing the stages of the conservation work: 'before', 'after' and sometimes 'during'. The curator has also filed fragments of old linen linings and reinforcement fabrics, or false borders that he has removed from the tapestries. Why, however, aren't the old restoration threads that have been removed from the weaving included in these samples? Can't they also be considered documents relating to our heritage and its history, or rather, the reverse side of it? I discuted with the TAMAT's conservator-restorer who told me that he used to keep a sample of each thread that had been removed, but eventually stopped doing it so because tapestry owners weren't interested. For museum pieces and in certain institutions however, these threads would all be preservedon files as evidence of an era.
Can we imagine that an archaeologist would be interested in excavating a buried workshop? Perhaps, but in reality, it is unlikely that he would have found any trace of them; this waste, which is almost dust, is thrown away and eliminated from the workshop. Some anthropologists, interested in waste, like the artist, linger over and pay attention to it, but the artist undoubtedly stands out in the language and the material transformation that will be made of it.
After collecting, sorting and reconstituting these threads, I indeed asked myself how to conserve them, and I looked for different visual solutions to resolve this twofold question. How should one archive these particular documents and thereby question the very act of archiving; and how does one render visible the thread of a long history of attachments?
In Horizon (2021), I arranged the threads systematically and rigorously in a very thin, one-and-a-half-metre-long laboratory glass tube. This very fragile glass object was transformed into a chromatic timeline. This also evokes the sense of a core sample taken from the tapestry, as if to determine its composition.
Restoring-Conserving (2021) consists of a large conservation box in which each sample of thread collected is stored in small identical boxes. Neglected scraps are transformed into a precious collection. The isolated and classified threads suddenly evoke plant matter, lichen and insects. In addition to the threads, I collected words and verbs revolving around two gestures: 'restoring' and 'conserving'. It's no longer just a question of archiving colours, materials and shapes, but also gestures. Some words have become obsolete, such as rabibocher (patching up); others are highly specific to a particular discipline, such as 'rehabilitating' (law) or 'cryopreserving' (medicine). But the sheer number of them (over one hundred and twenty!) reflects the omnipresence and importance of these gestures in space and time. They reveal our long-standing and persistent attachment to acts associated with care and repair.
The scraps, now arranged in their conservation box, engage in dialogue with the monumental tapestries, reciprocal and not oppositional. Together they create an image with two sides, the back and the front. When in the museum, I stumbled across a small leaflet about the seventeenth-century tapestries of Enghien that was going to be thrown away. I grabbed it and on the final page I discovered a small image of female restorers at work. I decided to perforate the book with successively larger circles, as if going back in time, through the layers. The buried image, suddenly dis-covered, becomes the central element of the object. It's all we see now: these people repairing, working on a collective memorial process, maintaining the remains. An image of the tapestry and its reverse, the restoration process, are brought together on the same plane. The two images engage in a dialogue, while at the same time standing out from each other.
Although neither can be dissociated from the other, they differ in every respect, right down to the way in which they are approached. While my works featuring the thread scraps need to be approached as closely as possible, because they reveal the infinitesimal and require the viewer to have a tactile eye as near to the material as possible, the tapestries must be viewed from a distance to be fully appreciated. The (very) small story, through the role of the 'little hands', joins the great mythical tale. Another question arises then: are any other heroes? As it were, in the founding myths, the hero's job is precisely to repair and sew together the fragments1... Which stories do we choose to keep, and what do they say about us?
