aurèce vettier: var(verse), which is the rereading of “without our presence, the soil breaks down” by aurèce vettier.
“without our presence, the soil breaks down” is composed of 7 lines written with aurèce vettier’s AI-generated latent botanist handwriting. the poem serves as a thread for the black paintings of the “Potential Herbariums” series, shown during the exhibition POÈME SBJKT at Librairie Métamorphoses in Paris, in May 2023. together, the artworks embody the flow & form of the poem itself. In September 2024, LOAD Gallery in Barcelona exhibited the collection in Fine Print alongside works by Ana María Caballero.
aurèce vettier’s body of work is heavily influenced by the unfinished novel Mount Analogue by René Daumal, and “without our presence, the soil breaks down” is no exception. Daumal’s unfinished novel guided the conversation.
read aurèce vettier: (mount dialogue), a triangulated dialogue between Paul Mouginot, founder of aurèce vettier and poet + core member of theVERSEverse Elisabeth Sweet.
read “without our presence, the soil breaks down” by aurèce vettier:
without our presence, the soil breaks down,
and the rocks and the hillsides
fall apart.
the rivers lose their way, and so does our
tongue
that cannot tell of our deaths.
we think it is because you can’t bear to see us
rotting away into nothingness.
well, be comforted; we are saying this to you:
you are not what you used to be anymore
you are dying too.