Si tu me vois

Si tu me vois (2023 – 2024) is an installation composed of clay fish, reduced to enigmatic forms, scattered across the ground like in rare, documented phenomena of animal rainstorms.

On March 8, 2023, coinciding with International Women’s Day, a rain of fish fell upon the Australian town of Lajamanu. During this unusual meteorological phenomenon, animals are swept up in tornadoes and carried over great distances before falling back to the ground during heavy rainstorms. The troubling strangeness of this meteorological phenomenon arises not only from the territorial displacement of the species (from underwater to the sky) but mostly from the fact that some fish landed alive. Our current ecofeminist generation can interpret this phenomenon as a prophetic sign. Art au Centre displays this story, real in its factual basis but fictional in its surreal nature and artistic transposition, to question our interdependencies. Behind the window, the installation reveals a pre-apocalyptic landscape of which we remain mere spectators. As a freeze-frame, it captures a memory of the future.

The title refers to the “hunger stones”, which serve as hydrological markers. Located in riverbeds, these stones become visible only when water levels are extremely low. They are monuments that commemorate or portend famines. Installed or engraved during times of severe drought, they act as warnings: for instance, a rock in the Elbe River in Děčín, Czech Republic, bearing the inscription “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” (“If you see me, then weep”), reappeared in August 2022.