For over a decade, extremely intense fires—megafires—have been breaking out on every continent, burning larger areas each year. Their unpredictable behavior, intensity, and speed of spread make them uncontrollable. A consequence of human activity, they roam throughout all seasons, across territories that fail our imaginations, destroying all life in their path, leaving devastated landscapes and a disoriented population, torn between sadness, guilt, and anger.

Each year brings increasingly pessimistic predictions about our ability to halt this escalation.

Since 2019 Maryvonne Arnaud has been observing the consequences of climate change, notably the mega-forest fires in the Mediterranean, in Greece, on the island of Euboea and in Thrace in the Dadia-Lefkimi-Souffli park, regularly surveying these same territories in order to understand their evolution.

Accompanying résurgences Yves Citton (extract)

By exploring certain places on our planet, Maryvonne Arnaud reveals the past in the making—still visible, not yet crushed, not yet compacted and buried. The soils she unearths and photographs are still raw. Insolently present.

By photographing the things she finds between her feet, in traumatized places, Maryvonne Arnaud seems to have chosen a solitary adventure. No human figure in this soil journal. All that remains are frozen traces of suspended presences, fossilized existences. Footprints in the mud, deeply imprinted, which the rain fills with dirty water. Charred animal bones.

What could be more solitary than the turtle shells that mega-fires leave behind by the hundreds? What could be more threatening to our little dreams of individual sovereignty? These turtles carried their homes on their backs, believing they could go anywhere safely. All they had to do was retreat inside their fortress, close the door to any intruder, and believe themselves safe. Hence perhaps the shock felt at the sight of these charred shells littering the ground of the blackened forests of Euboea. What if these gray bones against blackened backgrounds traced on the surface of the soils of our present the traumas of our future tragedies, rather than the traces of our past lives?

These soils, cauterized by mega-fires, however, show something quite different from the desperate prospect of our future collapses. The very notion of collapse would deny the stubborn persistence with which the soils photographed by Maryvonne Arnaud surface: far from sinking into bottomless cave-ins, they resist collapse. They affirm a force that is neither obscure nor subterranean, since it brings to light that which it holds back from falling.

The solitude of these traumatized worlds actually testifies to a tireless proliferation of multitudes. (…)

The philosopher Daniel Bougnoux thus comments on this disturbing experience of an exhibition where the images are present only in our own mental imagination: “To exhibit only words in a museum, and on this scale, what a challenge! This game of interlockings, and referrals, tells us something about our ways of apprehending and handling the vast world around us. Words will never give us the equivalent of the thing seen, the legible does not equal the visible; and no painting, circumscribed within its frame, will cover the bouquet of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory sensations…, tied together by a landscape. The (semiotic) map is not the territory. But the characteristic of art, or even of a word, is not to represent a world, but to suggest it, to reduce it to a sketch capable of setting a chain of thoughts or sensations on fire. The slow wick of words sets our mental images ablaze…”

On each of the eight walls of the central aisle of the Grenoble Museum are printed pairs of texts:

The first is a fragment belonging to world literature and chosen by one of the invited authors, writer or philosopher: Daniel Bougnoux, Patrick Chamoiseau, Christian Garcin, François Jullien, Jacques Lacarrière, Marie-Hélène Lafon, Céline Minard, Alain Roger​.

The second text is a rebound written today by this author and which argues his choice: Why from my mental library retain this fragment: power of a description, arrogance of a proposition, radical questioning of our certainties about the countryside ? And the luxuriance of the sensibilities of the authors chosen refines our understanding of what makes a landscape emerge and impose itself on us: Jean Giono, Stendhal, Aragon, Héraclitus, Balzac, Aimé Césaire, Mario Rigoni Stern, Oscar Wilde (who prophesied in “The Decay of Lying”: “At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them »