Sans Titre

Cathryn Boch seizes paper in order to wound it. Under the needle of her sewing machine, surfaces crease, tighten, and pucker — living matter subjected to a tension that leaves it permanently altered. Her sources are cartographic: plans, topographic surveys, aerial photographs. These territorial documents become in her hands the terrain of a wider reflection — on the impermanence of borders, on the social, political, and ecological stakes that ceaselessly reconfigure our spaces. There is in this work something that belongs as much to the body as to the landscape. The mental and the physical space converge and intertwine within it. The landscapes she creates bear their own sutures — visible, assumed. In this work, she denounces the scandal of red mud in the Mediterranean: toxic industrial waste from aluminium production — residues from the processing of bauxite — illegally dumped off the French coast by the Pechiney plant until 1994, polluting the seabed. For Cathryn Boch, the border is never abstract. Demarcation line, migration trace, mark of occupation or alteration: it is a scar. The echo of a chaos already present, and of all the metamorphoses — human, planetary — yet to come.