Au bord du Volcan
In his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, French curator, art historian, and critic Nicolas Bourriaud writes, “There are no forms in nature, in the wild state, as it is our gaze that creates these, by cutting them out in the depth of the visible.” For Bourriard, an artwork—however complex or manufactured its mediums and messaging—is as natural and wild a space as any. And when a viewer enters and shares the aesthetic plane of art, their gaze carves a form, a meaning, from virgin space. The short of Bourriaud’s text: art is participatory.
Few artists and artworks so eagerly and intentionally invite this sort of viewer engagement as Ilanit Illouz’s collection of photographs, Au bord du Volcan (2025), at Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie. The photographer shot this project on the slopes of the still-active Italian volcano Mount Etna. The resulting photographs capture the aggregate granite products of the most recent solidified lava flows.
Beyond these details, peripheral to the image, each frame is essentially a visual tabula rasa. Illouz’s photographic strictures—magnifying the rock formations so just strata fit into frame and rendering them in a stodgy grayscale—scuff the images of all other relevant detail: there is no indication of scale, location, landscape, or angle. No lip of rock that gives way to anything but. Illouz even decides against staging her own interaction with Mount Etna. The images don’t give away the photographer’s shadow, footprint, or form. As Illouz translates them in photograph, rocks are not so much evidence of the physical world as they are an extraction from it. It is this removal from the world’s other constituents—both alive and not—that encourages correspondence now.
The rock as matter is a simple form: it is not alive, does not grow or reproduce, does not respond to environmental stimuli, does not evolve biologically. Still, I cannot help but project anthropoidal motifs onto Illouz’s aptly unnamed photographs. An outstretched palm in a granite outcrop. A layer of crust like a days-old scab. A friend that had accompanied me to the exhibit, another correspondent of Illouz’s photographs, finds first an angular chin, then a nose until she can make out an old man’s face.
Bourriaud later writes in his essay that art, especially art that doesn’t posit itself as singularly interpretable, incites “a forever unfinished discursiveness.” That is, as long as viewers see, contemplate, and gloss art, discourse about it will continue. If what Bourriaud writes is true, then my friend and I’s separate correspondences with Illouz’s rocks are a droplet in an ocean of idiosyncratic exchanges. Indeed, Bourriaud acknowledges that art has “countless correspondents and recipients.” Illouz’s rocks were rendered before us, so too they will be rendered after us. This is not to say that the images are so blank and flat as to require the viewer’s imposition, but rather that they are delightfully pliable and alive.
More delightful even is that Illouz doesn’t prescribe a precise coefficient for viewer translation. What you or my friend or I see is not mediated by the same factor. Our understanding flexes around the cultural, political, historical, social, and biographical material that we might engage with or cling to. Art is a location of correspondence not unlike a rendezvous point in a busy city, where strangers meet knowing they have arrived from various places and taken various routes on their way to the locale.
As remarkable as the images’ plastic space and shape is their extrication from time. Rock as a structure is so threaded with time and history, so necessarily plopped into Earth’s “Geologic Time Scale” upon its formation. All the slips and grooves, the joints and pores of the solidified lava in Illouz’s photographs are cue enough. What Illouz captures is one pause in a centuries long process of magma hardening. And almost tautologically, each print is cured with salt and ashes: essentially, Illouz has sprinkled the material of time back onto photographs that are seemingly evidence of it. Yet, the rocks of Illouz’s images are not at all anchored in time; in fact, the images are starved of it.
What Illouz’s strictures of hyper-zoom and grayscale do for the shape and scale of the rocks, they also do for time. Had Illouz retained the images’ colors or had a sliver of skyline, a grassy patch, or a human figure slipped into the image, a time of day, a season, an entire chronology and culture might have been betrayed. Instead, Illouz’s precise curation invites new temporalities, constricted only by gallery hours and internet access, to emerge with each viewer. In the exchange between viewer and art, there is the moment that the viewer perceives the Illouz-rendered Mount Etna rocks and no other moment. The images implore an intimacy between viewer and art in this way. When I look again at my favorite crag, the one that resembles a days-old scab, it is like I’ve urged the image into time.
Intimacy, I think, is the point of Illouz’s Au bord du Volcan and Bourriaud’s understanding of the art-viewer relationship in Relational Aesthetics. With images like Illouz’s that are pliable, having been removed from their space and time, you or I am left to carve out a form, a meaning in the piece. Whatever distinct, sometimes charged thing—object, figure, myth—we have carved, it is ours for at least as long as we gaze. For me, it is a wound almost healed. For my friend, the chin and nose are her grandfather’s. My friend and I take what our gaze has given us or, more appropriately, has co-authored with Illouz’s work, and hold it for a moment—a moment that we know is as temperamental and fleeting as the volcanic eruption that roused Illouz.
– Su Ertekin-Taner