EGP # 07 / THETA TRANCE MEMORIES
Laurie Dall’Ava
This green [...] is an offering from modern chemistry to its very first source of inspiration: plants, fungi, bacteria, the bricks of life, which evolution resulted in enzymes capable of making incredibly complex molecules through biochemical processes. There’s something like an ecstasy of matter, and of its endless transformations, in this pulsating green. Plants are the greatest chemists, and it’s also one of the many many reasons to protect them. - Victor Mazière
EGP#07 is a vibrating monochrome painted with Emerald Green Pigment (EGP). The pigment was synthesized in the laboratory by Victor Mazière, epistemologist and researcher, with whom the artist regularly collaborates. EGP is a mixture of two molecules, extracted from chlorophyll and from a component of cyanobacteria, chemically modified to make them water soluble and UV resistant. The resulting large-scale monochrome embeds the vital force of nature. In the words of Mazière: ‘There’s something like an ecstasy of matter, and of its endless transformations, in this pulsating green. Plants are the greatest chemists, and it’s also one of the many many reasons to protect them.’
In Theta Trance Memories, the fundamental enigma of the universe called consciousness is addressed in fragments, mixing references to the history of pharmacology, shamanism or neuroscience to a more archetypal expression of what a transcendental experience might be. Thus the text written by Victor Mazière and the visuals selected by Laurie Dall’Ava attempt to define the psychedelic experience as going beyond the logical relationships (such as the principle of noncontradiction and the linearity of time) that govern ordinary perception of the world. It is from the dialogue between two autonomous experiences of the ineffable that a third space is born, both conceptual and poetic, closer to a psychedelic experience’s phenomenology, which, by nature, escapes classification.
2023 – EGP#07. Emerald Green Pigment painting on canvas, 140 x 180cm, in collaboration with Victor Mazière
2023 – Theta Trance Memories. Documentation Anesthésie 2009-2023. Videoprojection
Courtesy of the artist
Commissioned by STUK, House for Dance, Image & Sound in the context of The Ecstatic Being. Between knowing and understanding (2023).
Laurie Dall’Ava
°1982, France
Laurie Dall’Ava is an artist who studied photography at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles where she lives and works. After her post-graduation at the Centro de la imagen, Lima, Peru, she spent many years traveling in South-America and developing her Documentation Anesthésie, an iconographic base from which she regularly draws to create different iterations. Since 2018, she has been working and experimenting with writer and researcher Victor Mazière on the synthesis of an organic green pigment derived from chlorophyll and cyanobacteria, lightfast enough to be used for silk screen prints, paintings, or installations. The work of Laurie Dall’Ava has been shown at the Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse, at the Centre Photographique d’Ile de France, Paris and many art centres and has been acquired by the FRAC Collection.
Portrait courtesy the artist