EN | FR
Panta rhei - Everything Flows , 2025-2026
© Daeseok An / Archives of the French Academy of Sciences
« Panta rhei » is a famous statement by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. It expresses the idea that nothing in the world is fixed or immutable: everything, like a fluid, is in constant transformation over time.
During my residency at Nekatoenea, I turned my attention in succession to the sky, the earth, and the traces left by human beings. The work I carried out there follows a backward movement: an attempt to trace the course of time, to read its marks, and to reconstruct its trajectories.
For this exhibition, I present a series of works inspired by the historical archives of the Abbadia Observatory. I was fascinated by the meticulous and rigorous process of recording the position of the stars: an approach that is both complex and possessed of an almost poetic precision. I began consulting the documents preserved at the observatory, the texts accompanying them, as well as contemporary sources, in order to reconstruct a language—that of the astronomers of the past—and to immerse myself in the memory of their nights of observation.
By retracing the thread of their work in this way, I came to understand that their gestures themselves consisted in inheriting from the past in order to inscribe, layer after layer, new signs onto what had already been traced. In these repeated marks, I perceive their efforts, their repetitions, and above all the immense flow of a time that no one could ever truly measure.
- Article ︎
During my residency at Nekatoenea, I turned my attention in succession to the sky, the earth, and the traces left by human beings. The work I carried out there follows a backward movement: an attempt to trace the course of time, to read its marks, and to reconstruct its trajectories.
For this exhibition, I present a series of works inspired by the historical archives of the Abbadia Observatory. I was fascinated by the meticulous and rigorous process of recording the position of the stars: an approach that is both complex and possessed of an almost poetic precision. I began consulting the documents preserved at the observatory, the texts accompanying them, as well as contemporary sources, in order to reconstruct a language—that of the astronomers of the past—and to immerse myself in the memory of their nights of observation.
By retracing the thread of their work in this way, I came to understand that their gestures themselves consisted in inheriting from the past in order to inscribe, layer after layer, new signs onto what had already been traced. In these repeated marks, I perceive their efforts, their repetitions, and above all the immense flow of a time that no one could ever truly measure.
- Article ︎
61 Nights, variable installation, 280 paper strips, 620 × 510 cm, 2025