Seizing time that passes: this is what the video Les cendres d’une montagne (“The Ashes of a Mountain”) offers us. Through experimentation, Amélie Proulx discovered that certain rocks metamorphose in a radical way when they are subjected to extremely high temperatures. Some change their colour or vitrify, while others, like this one, pulverize themselves several hours later. The artist thus accelerates a phenomenon that would have been spread out over hundreds, even thousands of years. However, beyond these experimental and technical considerations, the video is perhaps above all an invitation to contemplation and recollection. With gentleness and poetry, Amélie calls into question what we might have believed to be eternal … even the immutable does not seem to escape the work of time.
– Anne-Sophie Blanchet
Les cendres d’une montagne, 2022, video, 5 :40 (video made in collaboration with Soufiane Benrqiq)
Photo credit : Guy L’Heureux (for the installation stills)