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Reliquary XX–XXI
Version 2: La mort de l’auteur2024 (since 2009)
In their attempt to fix themselves within the fabric of history, the artists become subject to a mode of preservation that is itself traumatic. The reproductions – sourced from books, newspapers, and archival albums – are crumpled, compressed, and minimized: they literally do not fit the space allotted to them within the system. The double-layered box structure evokes both a museological display and a necropolis.
This architecture constructs not only a chronicle of death but an image of violence enacted upon the authorial body – upon the image, the memory, and the very idea of immortality. In these miniature capsules, the artist is not preserved but erased. The empty compartments mark out the space of future disappearance already inscribed within the archive’s architecture. Thus, Reliquary XX–XXI / Version 2: La mort de l’auteur functions as an ironic obituary for the art system itself, where preservation is inevitably accompanied by forgetting, and the gesture of memory becomes a gesture of reduction.
Reproductions
Contents of the Reliquary Compartments