©Apolline Ducrocq
©Apolline Ducrocq
Amiens moved me deeply through its industrial past and its architectural heritage. Immersing myself in the archives of the Somme departmental collections, I discovered columns of baskets rising up across several archival photographs of the city’s landscape. Intrigued by these particular forms, I found myself drawn to numerous images of the floating market. These wicker baskets carry stories within them. They are symbols of transport and physical labour.
My sculpture project borrows the postures of materials visible in these photographs. It brings to light the invisible gestures of the women who worked the Hortillonnages and questions our relationship to space and collective memory, inviting reflection on the traces of the past that persist in the present.
The materials chosen for this sculpture, metal and concrete, refer to founding symbols. The metal recalls the mooring rings passed down from mother to daughter, while the concrete, borrowed from post-war construction, evokes those edifices built to last. These materials, used to anchor the most solid of structures, here fix the gestures of the women workers in place, underscoring their essential role: at once invisible and indispensable, like the foundations of a building.
By giving rise to new forms that are both modest and spectacular, the artist produces a collision between different temporalities and pays tribute to the trajectories of these objects that were once part of the landscape of Amiens.