Alalie is a homophone for the French hallali, a hunter’s bugle call shortly before a kill, and a synonym for aphasia, a condition induced by severe shock and resulting in speechlessness. In this case L’Alalie – a symptom of the emotional distress caused by the fact that both the planet’s wildlife and certain human population groups are facing a future fraught with uncertainty – is a large-scale map of the world made in charcoal out of the names of animals threatened with extinction, written in some of the world’s endangered or extinct languages. A giant robotic paintbrush gradually erases the map out inch by inch over the duration of the exhibition in a continuous loop over the span of 48 hours – the average time today for which it takes another species to become extinct, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. All that’s left, eventually, is the black trace of the charcoal that forces the viewer to contemplate a world turned abstract – and ultimately incomprehensible – due to the absence of its wildlife: indeed, a completely different world to the one we know.

La Pierre de Diamond (The Diamond Stone), a modern-day Rosetta Stone, draws on the theories put forth in evolutionary biologist and historian Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Using three different scripts (as with the original Rosetta Stone) the work draws parallels between three different milestones in the history of mankind: the emergence of animal farming among settled populations in the Neolithic period; the Anthropocene; and the next leap forward, through a translation of the Arecibo message, a radio signal sent out into space in the late twentieth century in the hope of communication with alien life. All three scripts have been carved into a stone containing hundreds of fossilised creatures, which takes us all the way back to the Cretaceous period (145-66 million years ago), a time when humans had not yet walked the Earth and today’s deserts were covered by water. Imagine a planet untouched by human hand.

Roadkill Coat embodies a dual ritual: on the one hand, it is a macabre act of cataloguing and collecting animals killed by passing vehicles and collected from the side of the road; on the other, it implies an “approval” of the animal victims as encountered in the tradition of the Corsican mazzeri – or dream-hunters – as well as in many other shamanistic systems (such as those of the Inuit, the Sakha or the Huni Kuin). The work explores the intersection between the political and the natural, the human and the animal. It is a contemporary form of documenting a very concrete reality, which is however hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated to the physical sciences: that of the disappearance of endemic species caused by human activity and neglect.