Mahault Lavoine
40x20x10 cm, pencil drawing, on paper
We revere men and ideologies, they come to power, statues are made, they show their power, unveil them proud and marvelous, looking at people, aiming to the future. They forshadow a prosperous and brighter tomorrow. But history stops death. A downfall, a war, a revolution, and these statues at the centre of our landscapes remind us for a painful past. We no longer shout for their glory, we ask for their demolition. We behead them, erase them to make them disappear from our full of violent history, hoping for a peaceful future.
Mahault Lavoine (1989) is a French multidisciplinary artist who graduated from the École supérieure d’Art et de Design in Valenciennes in 2015. Her practice explores the boundaries of landscape and its representation, with a particular focus on migration. Her earlier projects include D’un monde à l’autre (2013) and 407 camps (2015), the latter exhibited in 2016 as part of the group show "Encoding and Decoding Borders", organized by antiAtlas of the Borders. In 2019, she was awarded the 9th prize at the festival for her photographic project Missing Migrants, which was later exhibited at Le Bleu du ciel, a photography center in Lyon, France.