The documentary video on the artwork making and installation on site is at the end of the text.
On January 18, 2023, the “Conseil de la Sculpture du Québec” founded in 1961 invited its members to participate in the 12th edition of ART AU VIGNOBLE, held at VIGNOBLE CÔTE DE VAUDREUIL
When I received the invitation, I was reading a text published in 2020, based on figures from the U.S. website of Energy Information Administration (EIA) covering the use of 95,000,000 barrels of oil per day worldwide.
Here it is :
Global oil consumption has exceeded 95 million barrels per day. The barrel, which is the unit of volume used in industrial and financial circles, is equivalent to approximately 159 liters (158.987 liters exactly). In other words, our civilization “drinks” more than 15 billion liters of this fossil “energy” every day.
To imagine this daily dose, you have to imagine the barrel as a small barrel 50 cm wide by 80 cm high. If we line up 95 million of them side by side, that’s more than 40,000 kilometers, or around the Earth on the equator – every day. We can also stack them: we then obtain a column… 76,000 kilometers high – every day.
The last barrel is at an altitude twice as high as that of a telecommunications satellite. More than half of this oil is burned in vehicle engines: cars, trucks, boats, trains and planes. Around a tenth is consumed in thermal plants which produce electricity. A twentieth goes up in smoke in the heaters. It is also used to extract oil from the ground, transport it, then refine it into various fuels, raw materials and road surfaces.
Finally, it is used to operate factories, many of which use petroleum products to transform them. in all kinds of objects, materials and chemical products: packaging, automobile parts, construction materials, furniture, electronic equipment, textile fibers, paints, solvents, phytosanitary products, cosmetics, etc. Most of these products end up in landfill or incineration, ultimately polluting air, soil and water.
These figures are worth pondering, especially if we still doubt that human activities can have an influence on the atmosphere of our planet. The thickness of this atmosphere is also very thin: oxygen begins to run out when we are on Mount Everest, less than 9 kilometers above sea level, or 75,991 km lower than the last barrel of our daily oil column…
This text does not say everything. It doesn’t stop there. There are systemic secondary consequences which only manifest themselves in discrete accumulations which do not easily come to mind and take precedence over all others.
The carbon atom is the basis of everything that lives, whether plant or animal. A tree for example, like everything plant-based, makes its leaves by taking the carbon present in the air from which it makes its substance using the energy it receives profusely from the sun.
Over hundreds of millions of years, everything plant-based has continuously absorbed billions of joules of solar energy.
During hundreds of millions of years of growth, ignoring the second law of thermodynamics which only accounts for material thermal degradation while the living process is only growth spanning millions of years.
To fuel this growth, the plant world absorbed an immeasurable amount of energy from solar radiation which subsequently found its way into the earth’s subsoil in the form of oil and gas that we frantically extract and return to the earth. atmosphere millions of times faster than it necessarily accumulated in the deep earth’s subsoil.
Ignoring the processes propelling life in the form of trillions of organisms of countless categories, our thermo-industrial world added energy from coal, nuclear power plants, and as many sources as it could design. Even hydroelectricity as well as what turns out to be insane, biofuels, by consuming living things, also contribute to global warming.
Furthermore, this blindly entropic world strives to globally release billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while reducing the vegetation cover that could help absorb carbon and solar energy, which has the effect to trap the thermal energy produced between the two, which causes an uncontrollable and increasingly frequent increase of hot spots in the atmosphere.
Hence the sculpture entitled Embrasement, of which I made a video which presents a world which more closely resembles the thermal balance of the natural world which, despite 5 mass extinctions, continues its primordial action consisting of extending a viable territory of its own substance. on a lithosphere which would otherwise be irremediably sterile.
The following texts are included in the video:
Creator of culture, the artist is a seeker of being, of meaning and of human visions. Through art he imagines the cultural universe in which we discover our humanity. Without art and artists, we would be reduced to playing our humanity by ear.
Oil made the extravagant 20th century which was mega in everything. His frenzy of “everything is possible” could only result, we sometimes note with dismay, in an irresistible conflagration of everything.
In 2023 I have the opportunity to present a work at the vineyard
“Côte de Vaudreuil”.
Every day I wear t-shirts on wich i had printed the following:
All artists. Art, the first art of all, is the art of becoming… Human.
I strongly believe it. This guides each of my steps, each of my gestures of the art that I seek. An important part of my journey. This then makes each of us a witness actor who must embody it.
In this sense, the vineyard is a fascinating artwork. An artwork that proudly houses more than sixty sculptures.
The creations of a few dozen enthusiastic artists.
Which I celebrate by creating another media artwork that shows them all. A video that makes the link between the arwork, in an artwork, among artworks.
Bourjoi september 18th 2023
