KÓSMOS - Plurality of Worlds Like an Aby Warburgian Library [2017-2019]

A photographic constellation, Plurality of Worlds Like an Aby Warburgian Library was made in a part of the American southwest encompassing Four Corners (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah) and southwest Texas.

Amélie Labourdette captures clues in the landscape and combines an anthropological analysis with a subjective poetics of images to develop a perspectivist reading of this area of multi-layered memories. In Kósmos, she considers the primordial strangeness of our terrestrial "environment", perceived as an encrypted world, and attempts to express the human's relationship to the biosphere and the cosmos. Kósmos holds up a mirror not only to the ancestral knowledge of Four Corners’ native populations, but also to contemporary scientific research in fields such as astronomy and ecology as well as projections of “utopian” or environmental impacts—manifestations of a modernity permeated by hubris.

The Pueblo (Hopis, Navajos, Zunis, Acoma, Keres, Tewa, Tiwa, Towa) and the American southwest’s other native peoples do not consider space and the beings inhabiting it as material objects that they can own, control or conquer. They have developed forms of knowledge relating to astronomy, the result of which is a perception of the cosmos where all the entities forming it are interrelated and the conception of time is circular, where past, present and future are not necessarily consecutive but coexist, intermingle and shed light on each other.

Kósmos is a constellation where the world of humans, animals, plants, minerals and the sky is approached in a web of relationships through analogical and poetic comparisons of “cosmovisions” and temporal strata.


AMÉLIE LABOURDETTE
Born 1974, Troyes, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.
Visual artist, photographer, Amélie Labourdette has shown her work in various exhibitions in France and abroad. Since 2015, she has been carrying out artistic residencies in southern Italy, Tunisia and the United States. In 2016, she won the Sony World Photography Awards in the Architecture category with her Empire of Dust series. In 2017, she was awarded the CNAP’s Contemporary Documentary Photography Support Grant for her project Traces d’une occupation humaine.