4stones 2022

Advocating for a world free of borders, 4stones is an ode to liberty.

The project started on a beach near Tarifa in Andalusia, Spain, a few days after September 11. I walked miles and miles thinking about the tragedy and collected four pebbles.

I brought them back to Paris and installed them on a shelf in a specific way. After each cleaning, I would set them back in the same order.

One day, returning from a trip, I noticed the position of the stones had changed. The friend who was taking care of my cats made a new arrangement. This gave me the idea to ask individuals from all over the world to make their own composition.

The ritual is always the same. I meet people, I give them the stones and they arrange them the way they like. I take a few photos of their arrangement to have an accurate record. Later, I recreate the composition they did and make my final photo.

I come from France and I live in another country; the stones come from Spain and travel over all continents; my guests come from countries all over the world, and we meet anywhere else. 4stones has no borders and creates links between people, making no difference. It is universal and at the same time, it shows in a simple way the singularity of each individual.

Twenty years after, this project is still going on. I wanted for a long time to experiment with the printmaking techniques to make a new series of the 4stones. To create these prints, I started with cyanotypes I did during the summer. It’s a cameraless process that exposes the pebbles to the power of the sun directly on sensitive paper. These prints are scanned to generate two stencils, one for the stones and one for the background. Then, paint is applied with a squeegee through a silkscreen to produce the print.

The colors are inspired by the work of Sanzo Wada, a Japanese painter who established a guide for color combinations.

To know more about 4stones, please look at the retrospective published on my blog for the 20th anniversary of the project.