La première résidence artistique organisée par MuPa se déroule en 2025 et voit l’artiste polonaise Matylda Tracewska accueillie au sein du Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle de Paris.
In March 2025, Matylda Tracewska, accompanied by Eleonora Savorelli, the curator of the residency, spent a week at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle to meet with the museum’s scientists. They had the opportunity to engage with Pierre Sans-Jofre, head of the geology collection, in order to refine the research project and select the stones on which Matylda Tracewska will work. The residency will take place throughout the month of September and will include two outreach days dedicated to school groups and professionals (artists, curators, collectors, and journalists).
Projet de recherche de la résidence
“Un des mondes. Pierres sensibles et homologies inattendues“, in English “One of the worlds. Sensitive stones and unexpected homologies.”, is a project at the intersection of natural sciences, ethnology, and philosophy. The starting point of this artistic research lies in discussions about specific stones — symbolic witnesses of the origin of life on Earth, and a bridge between inert matter and living organisms: stromatolites.
With the support of scientists from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Pierre Sans-Jofre, Director and Scientific Head of the Department of Mineralogy and Geology, and Sylvain Bernard, researcher at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics, and Cosmochemistry, the artist Matylda Tracewska (Warsaw, Poland, 1978) and curator Eleonora Savorelli (Lugo di Romagna, Italy, 1997) decided to deepen their exploration of stromatolites by proposing an artistic perspective that draws from both scientific and ethnological knowledge.
The word “stromatolite” comes from the Greek stroma (meaning layer or bed) and lithos (meaning rock). These stones display a series of stratifications that suggest imaginary horizons, landscapes, nests, embryos, through which the artist reflects and, while respecting their intrinsic qualities, will create a core body of work using a previously unseen approach.
Stromatolites confirm the presence of organic matter and oxygen on Earth as far back as 3.5 billion years ago. These formations emerged thanks to sediments of microorganisms, particularly cyanobacteria, unicellular organisms capable of photosynthesis, and thus producers of the oxygen essential for the development of other forms of life.
The collaboration with scientists at the Muséum has been crucial to determine the age, lithology, and provenance of each stone that Tracewska will work with. Among the geographical references are: the Richat Structure (Mauritania), Woman Lake (Canada), Death Valley (California), Barberton and Pongola (South Africa), England, and France. Each of these regions has been inhabited by peoples with their own creation myths, some of which have been more or less accurately reconstructed: Berbers, Ojibwe, Timbisha Shoshone, Zulu, Celts, and Gauls. As most of these cultures were rooted in oral traditions, ethnology serves as a scientific tool to better understand their people and their worldviews. In the early phases of this research, the scientists often approached the topic with a certain freedom, filling the gaps in authentic narratives with elements of their own imagination. For Tracewska, this blending of fact and fiction becomes a rich source of inspiration. What is measurable, rational, and scientific intermingles with what is intuitive, sensed, and elusive.
Stromatolites, which retain fossil traces of the life forms that once nourished them, form in marginal environments, between land and water. Beyond the uniqueness of the stones themselves, the defining element of this body of work will be the nature of the research the artist undertakes. Through her artistic language, rooted in painting and mosaic, Tracewska will explore myths and legends of the origins of life, Earth, and humanity, based on the specific cultural histories of each stone’s place of origin.
The theme of world creation has fascinated humankind throughout history. Every people and culture constructs its own cosmogony. Many phenomena once explained through mythology, religion, or philosophy are today interpreted through science. Yet some questions still elude rational understanding — and likely always will. As Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in his essay Myth and Meaning :
“I cannot imagine that one day scientific knowledge will be complete and finished. There will always be new problems that emerge at the same pace: because, as science succeeds in answering questions that seemed philosophical a few decades or a century ago, new ones arise that were not previously perceived as problematic. There will always be a gap between the answers science can give us, and the new questions those answers generate.”
(Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 1978)
Stromatolites, scientific objects of study at the MNHN, become in this artistic project both protagonists, construction materials, and backdrops for mythological narratives about the origins of the world, shaped by the cultures and peoples of the regions where the stones were found. These stories will be evoked mimetically through minimalist pictorial interventions, while the stones themselves will serve as starting points for mosaic additions, regaining a dignity that emphasizes their significance in the history of humanity.
— Eleonora Savorelli