LE PLUS VIEUX PAYSAGE DU MONDE

The video work The World’s Oldest Landscape (2017–2019) is installed on a monumental wallpaper. It is a reconstruction of the “world’s oldest landscape” in northern China, where a 300-million-year-old fossilised forest was discovered in 2010. In the video, we hear the sound of regular strikes on rock in an open-pit coal mine—a landscape both barren and rugged. Professor Jun Wang pauses what he is doing and steps in front of the camera. He tells of the time when the scenery was still surrounded by water and dominated by a vol-cano at the centre. We follow him into the laboratory, see fossils and fragments of leaves and branches that were pre-served in a hard layer of volcanic tuff. This is how the researchers managed to reconstruct the fo-rest—Ren Yugao, the lab’s illustrator, created a visual image of it. The discovery of the illustration of this forest in a scientific magazine, of this “vegetational Pompeii” stood at the beginning of Pauline Julier’s work cycle, Naturalis Historia. – Text: Sarah Mühlebach