Petrification
Emile De Visscher Publishes in Recently Launched Image-Based Journal .able
Petrification, publication at .able Journal, 2023. Copyright: Emile De Visscher, Ophélie Maurus
On March 23rd, 2023, Emile de Visscher's contribution about petrification was published with the launch of .able, an image-based journal at the intersection of art, design, and sciences responding to the complexities of today’s society.
To explore the new format of scientific publishing offered by the .able Journal, Emile de Visscher invited Ophélie Maurus, independent art director and photographer for the Petrification research project. The main focus was to take advantage of the different layers of content in the platform to present the different dimensions of the project: speculative, symbolic, technical, etc. One of the most intriguing and difficult steps concerned the referencing systems as every scientific article is structured and built upon one. But how to create references with images rather than words? To do so, we gathered all the visual content we wanted to mention, and passed it through a photocopier several times, to obtain the same filter of black and white and rasterized effect, as a visual archive. Working on this .able-publication has been stimulating, both from a conceptual point of view and as a way to share the research conducted at MoA.
The Petrification project explores a technique for producing ceramics from cellulose and transforms accessible materials - such as paper, cardboard, fabric, or rope - into a black rock. Developed by Emile De Visscher, the project is now being invested in by other designers and researchers in the context of the» Matters of Activity« Cluster of Excellence at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Because it allows for applications in the production of artworks, but also heating or filtering materials, this process - which uses atmospheric pyrolysis - opens up new technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities. This passage from the organic to the inorganic also questions our current ecological condition: the role of design in the Anthropocene era, the heritage of manual traditions, but also our relationship to waste and to the objects that survive us.
De Visscher, Emile and Ophélie Maurus. 2023. »Petrification: Material Transmutations and Speculative Archaeology.« .able journal: https://able-journal.org/petrification