Folded to fit

The work of an historian could be that of filling gaps, giving meaning to a suite of events from exhumed documentary sources and to construct, like a novelist, a plot in order tell us a story that really took place. The work of Yann Sérandour is similar to the work of that historian: using artefacts borrowed from his predecessors, potential accidents and chances, he leads investigations and indexes missing pieces, in order to prolong and cast doubt on histories.

The work of Yann Sérandour has often referred to conceptual art of the sixties and seventies, periods of particular interest to him because of their copious diffusion in the form of publications and prints – his material of predilection. In his recent work, he moves his attention to other fields and more distant times, strengthening a temporal gap with our contemporaneity.

A classic conservation box – known in French as a ‘boîte à chasses’ (a term with a double meaning of ‘a box with excess board’ and ‘a hunting box’) – is covered in camouflage cloth and holds a group of eight real-sized reproductions (A3) of mounted herbarium specimens of common reeds collected around the world. Each mount is printed on Japanese paper that has been folded to fit into the B4-sized edition by using the broken lines of the plant.