Astragals.

Astragals by Tiphaine Calmettes, a resident artist of sputnik oz. 27/02/17. I took the road around 11:30 am at the wheel of the car graciously loaned by Martin rocked by the CD of classical music that he also offered me. It took me an eternity to arrive until my first stage: Arborétum Mlyňany. As much as I control the little blue ball in town by foot, but by car it is so easy to miss an exit ... Arboretum Mlyňany is a botanical garden, as saying that winter period is not the best to visit this kind of place, even if inevitably there is a form of charm. All the indications were obviously in Slovak, small labels hanging on the bare branches of trees twirled, silent towards me. Joining the stars pointed to my google map in the idea of collecting images across Slovakia, this is how this exhibition began to take shape. But the story began a little earlier with the analysis of Muriel Pic of the work of GW Sebald. In his reading of Sebald's work, Muriel Pic develops the notion of the reversibility of images in their relationship to the moment of remembrance. Read in pictures as we read the tarot. How can the traces of the past be used as clues to the future? This is how I started to think about images and divination. In parallel Quentin Meillassoux, a French philosopher, spoke to me of another way about reading in objects with the concept of archifossile, challenging the scientific knowledge about times that preceded all human presence. Ancestrality and future would have in common to be based on the speculative reading of signs which it is very easy to question. Among the images collected, my eyes stopped more particularly on the shelves of the museum of natural history of Bratislava filled with fossils and corals, inert objects witnessing a previous life; On organizations of random objects of constellar shapes; The textures and motifs of the caves and their stalagmite concretions; The proliferation of plants in unfriendly places; And other subjective signs. There are more than a hundred divinatory arts, so any random organization would be subject to interpretation, prediction, story. Astragalomancy is part of it. Astragale is the name given in antiquity to designate, the game now called “osselet”, composed of sheep bones. More known as a skill game it is also declined with astragalomancy as a divinatory art following the same principle as craps. The method is simple, one throws the bones, each face is linked to numbers and each combination to a maxim. But there is also the divination by the stone, throwing stones, the card draw, the stars, or more obscure, the prodigies and the monsters ... From these narratives all become possible, past and future coexist, the body seeks its place, leave its trace also. Photography gives time to forms to reveal themselves. They take up more and more space until it is necessary framing them back. Thus a duplication occurs, the object emancipates itself from its image as beyond the mirror, mirroring itself into a new emancipated reality emphasising the contrats. "When the boundary between the inside and the outside rises, and that those also form poles where there is permeability from one to another, a new "between" is established". (Living from a Landscape or The Unthinkable of Reason, François Julien). It is in this "between" that doubt arises and that the imagination takes over to complete the story.