I attempted to challenge the tension between object and context not only by evoking dynamic movement in the sculptures, but by playing with their relationship to the moving reality in which they are inserted. This, and my newly found pull toward socio-historical issues, led me to travel to Normandy, where I worked for five days with the strong tide that makes twelve meters of shore appear and disappear everyday. I camped by the coast for five days, with the intention of working according to the strict schedule of nature. I had an interval of about five hours of low tide to work on the sculpture, before the water would start to advance again and the location get submerged for seven hours. I worked according to this schedule and by drilling the bottom of the sea to create a stable basis for the sculpture, and then pouring concrete in a silicone mold, I was able to make Sculpture in the sea. The figure, just like Robert Capa’s the falling soldier, depicts a man caught in the act of falling, balancing in that short moment between life and death.

The idea of collaborating with nature’s schedule was inspired by the book “Mushroom at the end of the World”, where Anna Tsing explores alternatives to the linear and arguably violent way in which Western tradition has looked at the environment up to now. Tsing writes about seasonality as a lost principle in modern times; the presence of an ecological rhythm to work with represented by the tide and the alternance of daily light and darkness, allowed me to bring to the next level my interest in circumstantiality and ecological relationships. The work builds on the combined performative potentials of the sculpture itself and of the changing environment, which interplay results in an actual cycle of life for the sculpture, which intermittently lives and dies two times a day. I do believe that thinking in terms of indeterminacy is especially relevant during these deeply complex and precarious times. As put by Anna Tsing, “What if precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?” (Tsing 2015).