step 5 - Picturing ablation, 2017

Stone, plaster, aluminum 33 x 25 x 24,5 cm
The stone used for this step was taken from the huge rock wasteland that the Granier's recent crumbling created. Its colour and salient arcuates give its provenance away ; it comes from the layer of the hardest type of limestone – called 'urgonian' – which composes the mountain's summit.
'Suggesting ablation' can be seen as the opposite of the fourth and previous step.
'Lowering the fracture' aimed to take the imprint of a cut in the mountain rock in order to restore the stone which had been pulled off from it, while in step 5, I use the newly ablated stone to picture the mark it would have left onto the wall of the mountain. A mark of the empty and absent, like a scar – or the stone can be seen as a flap of skin, and the mountain as the body that created it.
'The stones we see in the mountains are like skin flaps leaving the body which created it.' - Giuseppe Penone